If I were you I'd add a facebook like button to each thing and allow people to create lists of things they love just by clicking the facebook like button (no registration required, just save their list to a cookie).
Then if they signup they can save their list. This makes it easy for users to jump right it in, and may bring in a lot of traffic from facebook. Of course, some users may not want to share each thing they like on facebook, so you'd probably want a normal "love this" button as well for logged in users.
There are like buttons on the item pages... (like here: http://thingist.com/t/item/4720/) I tried putting them in the feed, but they looked really out of place (it made things look really really cluttered)
I really like the idea of [optionally] importing facebook likes... Hmm
(As a sidenote: can I just point out that facebook's API is freaking awesome?)
> (As a sidenote: can I just point out that facebook's API is freaking awesome?)
No you may not. Facebooks API is horrible. I was just implementing the like buttons on my site and realized that they have to be iframes (even the FBXML or whatever its called creates iframes). This turns out a bit ridiculous on pages such as yours (if you put them on the feed page) and mine where you Twitter on the other hand allows you to just gives you a URL which points users to a link to share the page.
Well, you could write your own, but you'd have to have users authenticate the application. In my opinion, this isn't much different than twitter, since both actions would require two clicks:
as far as i'm aware, you can't really write your own. I was watching the network traffic for a submit and it was pretty ridiculous how many transactions it did when you clicked "like" (about 4 if i remember correctly). Having the users authenticate the action would actually be good for sites like mine but facebook doesn't seem to provide that option.
Then if they signup they can save their list. This makes it easy for users to jump right it in, and may bring in a lot of traffic from facebook. Of course, some users may not want to share each thing they like on facebook, so you'd probably want a normal "love this" button as well for logged in users.