Twitter faves: all the rave

It seems the Twitter favorites function is rapidly replacing Delicious as a bookmarking utility for me and several of my fellow Twitter users. (If the idea of “favoriting” a tweet is new to you, here’s a primer on the favorites function.)

Twitter-faves-AC

Back in the days before I became so addicted to relied so heavily on Twitter, I would post useful, interesting or bloggable links to my Delicious site. But I haven’t done that since January. Worse, I haven’t added any links to my blog-fodder category since last August. (That’s how I’d tag stuff I’d discover that I found worthy of a future blog post. Now I’ve got 91 items languishing there, and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get around to blogging about any of them anytime soon.)

These days, I use my Twitter favorites category to bookmark sites for later reading.

Twitter-faves

A lot of my fellow tweeters do, too. @MasonDyer has amassed 618 favorites as of Tuesday. (“Hoarders” episode, anyone?) @nathanayres, @DebraSanborn and @mikepetroff all collect links with their favorites function. Even Delicious Super User Mark Greenfield, whose social-bookmarking prowess was the subject of a post on this blog last September, uses Twitter to store links that he later transfers to his Delicious site. This leads Mike Petroff to wonder whether a web app exists that synchronizes Twitter favorites to Delicious.

Sounds like a web app whose time has come. I wish Mike (or someone) would build it. I would use it. It’s just too bad the name Twitterlicious is already taken. Twitter favorites + Delicious bookmarks sounds Twitterlicious to me.

Facebook: growing old gracefully?

Are you banking on Facebook as a strategy for reaching prospective students? How about as a means to connect with current students? If so, you may be missing the mark.

More than half of Facebook’s members in the United States are age 35 or older — and fewer than 1 of every 4 are younger than 24, according to a comScore Media Metrix study cited in a recent New York Times piece. With these statistics in mind, it may make more sense to see Facebook as a platform for reaching alumni than prospective students.

But the question lingers: Which social media tool works best for reaching the traditional college-bound market? I don’t think Facebook is completely irrelevant, but neither is it the silver bullet.