Discussing my idea that Twitter clients should show one’s friends’ favorites on another blog, I’ve learned that this (like many things) is easier said than done. Twitter doesn’t provide a way for a program to say, “give me all of [username]’s friends’ favorites”. Instead, a program would have to ask, “who are [username]’s friends?”, then make a request for the favorites for each person individually, then stitch them together into the timeline. So, more like an RSS reader polling a number of different feeds. It could work, but it’d be more complicated, barring Twitter standardizing this sort of query.
I stand by the notion that there’s untapped potential in the ability to mark a post as a favorite. My guess is that not many people ever star a tweet, or even know you can, and I think this is because doing so doesn’t do a whole lot right now.