Anyone use Twitter Favorites?

I’ve wondered for many months of why that little ‘Favorite’ button was both on  the website, aswell as supported in so many Twitter clients. It is a little star that saves things, doesn’t reshare or do anything fancy, and simply lets you save a Tweet for later. Yes, much of the web is centered around saving things for later, but I really didn’t find it that useful. It just takes up space that could instead be given to a more useful feature. I’d really like to see ‘favorites’ mimic Friendfeed’s ‘Like’ action, where instead of having to Retweet a message, instead I could just ‘like’ it. Robert Scoble points out here that Retweeting is simply the gateway into eventual implementation of the ‘like’ feature. 

But then something hit me. I noticed that the ‘Favorite’ RSS feed was public, meaning that I could have any service come in and grab it. Now I’m thinking to myself: “What service aggregates RSS feeds and allows me to share them with others”. I immediatly imported my feed into Friendfeed as a Custom RSS/Atom feed and now I have a stream of all the Tweets I find interesting, shared as another item. The best part about it is that if I wanted to do Retweet-like functionality, I could set up Friendfeed to simply post all my messages coming from that RSS stream into Twitter. 

The best part of Technology is the fact that people can take the tools that a service gets them, and find cool new ways to do stuff with them. Afterwards I checked on Friendfeed for other people with similar RSS feeds, and found several people feeding their favorites into Friendfeed. I’ve seen people pull RSS feeds from services I didn’t even know offered them. 

Many people have probably came up with many different implementations for the Twitter Favorites section. How do you use yours? Do you use it to save for later? Do you somehow share it via RSS? Do you check others favorites?

- Tyler C.