By request, a bit of explanation of how and why I favorite things on the internet. (Or favor them. Or like them. Whatever.)

First, where do I favorite? On Twitter, certainly: I love lots of tweets! On Facebook! That’s mostly for liking things outside of Facebook, around the web. I like lots of videos on YouTube and on Vimeo, the latter of which probably has the most satisfying like/favoriting animation on the web. I judiciously like things on MLKSHK. I suppose I still favorite things on Google Reader from time to time, which always involves me starring, sharing, +1ing and clicking 10 other buttons in their UI, since I don’t really know which one does what. YouTube has both liking and favoriting, too, but somehow that redundancy doesn’t bother me as much.

And, perhaps more visibly than anywhere else, I star all kinds of things on Stellar, which is also where many of these favorites get aggregated and shared with others; It’s my, erm, somewhat enthusiastic use of favoriting on that service (I’m by far the most prolific star-giver in these early days of the awesome little site) which has inspired the most recent “dude, what the hell?” responses from many of my friends. As of 6 weeks ago, Jason showed me stats where I had about 1/3 more favorites than the next-highest person on the site.

Why am I so prolific with the stars? Well, one part is that I am just an enthusiastic person: I like lots of stuff! There’s also social expectation; My favorite (see what I did there?) friend David Jacobs is a master of favoriting and taught me the wonders of the form years ago. In the early days of (now-defunct) Vox, David was specifically called out when the app added favoriting:

By popular demand, we’ve introduced the ability for users to mark posts, photos, audio, video and books — from their own blog as well as other Vox blogs — as favorites. We’ve nicknamed this feature the “David Jacobs” after friend and Vox user, who, at last count has favorited 1,677 photos on Flickr. It’s a great way to keep track of good stuff you’ve seen on Vox, as well as keep a record of your own things that you particularly like.

Do me a favor

Despite my enthusiasm, my habit of enthusiastically clicking stars and thumbs-up all over the web is not unconsidered. Instead, my intention is fairly consistent, though I’m aware the semantics of these functions are slightly different in all these various services. A few common themes:

• Acknowledging good work: When someone writes a tweet that makes me laugh or think, or produces a video that’s worth the time to watch it, I favorite it or like it as a “reward” of sorts to them. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t check the number of likes/faves on a work they’ve made at least some of the time, and that way they know I was rooting for them.

• Retaining for the future: Favoriting items increases my ability to retrieve them later. I’ve got Instapaper and Readability and Pinboard all hooked up together so that things I star get saved as bookmarks that I can retrieve later. Similarly, ThinkUp can show me a rough version of the links that were shared in tweets that I’ve favorited. Basically, I’m more likely to favorite something if I think it’s worthwhile enough to return to later.

• Implicit sharing: These days, this may be my main motivation for favoriting lots of stuff on the web. Truth is, I often miss the curation and editorial fun of the link blog that I used to publish on this site. (Give me a shout if you remember that — it’s been seven years since I stopped doing it, old-timer!) By judiciously favoriting good things across the web, I can share them with my friends, assuming they’re on services like Stellar and Favstar and Facebook with me.

Now, there are a couple of factors that make my favoriting behavior unusual, compared to normal web users. (Beyond the fact that I probably waste even more time on the web than most people.) First, my social graph is extremely distorted. I have a lot of Twitter followers, so many apps and services that use “popular” Twitter accounts as fodder for link/tweet popularity factor in my favoriting behavior disproportionately. I’m not quite a suggested user on Stellar the way I am on Twitter (since Stellar doesn’t have that concept), but I do have an exaggeratedly prominent placement on that site, too, so the impact of my favoriting is amplified.

In short, favoriting or liking things for me is a performative act, but one that’s accessible to me with the low threshold of a simple gesture. It’s the sort of thing that can only happen online, but if I could smile at a person in the real world in a way that would radically increase the likelihood that others would smile at that person, too, then I’d be doing that all day long.

Further reading

• ToRead is To Be Human, from 2007, was about the fundamental optimism people have when they tag an article as something they intend to read in the future. Many people use favoriting this way today.
• An Interview with Paul Bausch that I did on the old Six Apart blog back in 2003. I’ve assigned the epithet “father of the permalink” to Paul for years, but in reality, just before Paul was implementing permalinks in Blogger, Jason was experimenting with them on Kottke.org. I think it’s no accident that both are innovating on favoriting, Jason with Stellar and pb with continued experiments (some inane) on MetaFilter. Favoriting is the most fundamental, natural action to perform on the permalink, which is the atomic unit of content on the web.
• The Power of the Audience, from early last year, was the first time I really explored the idea of favorites as social, gestural feedback for creators. The situation here hasn’t gotten much better since then.
• Actions are the Body Language. Back in 2008, I’d made a page to capture my social actions like favoriting, and wrote a bit about why. (The page of those actions is totally broken now, sadly, but being able to archive those gestures is one of the reasons I’m so passionate about making ThinkUp work well.)
• Matt Haughey’s post on his feedback loops that he relies on online, from early 2010.
• And finally, last year at Web 2.0 Expo NYC, I asked API head Ryan Sarver why favoriting is an afterthought on Twitter, at 7:27 in this interview video.

I wish there were a website that just had “favorite” (or “like”) buttons you could embed, without it being all tied in to all the other crazy stuff Facebook does. But I’d settle for someone hacking ThinkUp to better support archiving my Facebook “likes” so I’d have a record of all the things I enjoy on the web. Actually, what the hell: $500 to the charity of your choice if somebody wants to make that work. Plus, if you tweet about doing it, I’ll favorite your tweet.