Ooh. I just found this button on Amazon while reading the customer reviews of a book. It says: "Add this reviewer to your list of Favorite People. Whenever one of them writes a new review, you'll see it on the Friends & Favorites home page. " I was just saying the other day that I want a way to find, collect and catalog "favorite people". This is very commercial and has a ways to go, but it's a start.
Amazon takes things a step further by notifying me of new reviews by my favorite people. This obviously serves Amazon's interest in exposing me to more new products, but it also serves my interest in hearing the opinions of my favorite people. I would like to see much more of this with variations and permutations throughout the online world. Not only can I find interesting people and log them, but, equally cool from my point of view, I can be found and become a favorite person too. There's lots less labor involved in being found by kindred spirits than there is in going out and finding them one by one. Can you say personal branding?
If this little favorite people button could spread, like a good meme does, throughout the Net, we would really have something. I know that little web services apps have been written that suck Amazon's CD cover art into a personal database. What if I could suck the favorite people data out of various "places" and then compile it into one big database? What if that could all happen automatically and continuously or just be regularly updated when I click a button? Then we would have a way to track our favorite authors'/people's work. We would have a way to track our own work as well.