Sometimes, I feel like I want to bookmark a thread for specific reasons. For example, I have done business with a few freelances. All those PM's are now gone due to their age. So finding the name of the person to re-hire them, and even their sales thread requires alot of effort to find them. If I find someone I want to hire on a mobile, and wait to contact them when I get home on a laptop, I have to again search for them. What if you find an epic guide or tutorial, that you just have to read again, finding it isnt always easy. So a bookmark feature could be highly useful. Another feature (possible after its been running for a while) might be to filter threads forum wide based on how many people have bookmarked it. This is just my 2cents worth.
Most probably I haven't got your point here but wouldn't simply using the bookmark functionality built-in in any browser serve your purpose? :-/ Again, the no. of people bookmarking a thread is somewhat similar to the no. of people viewing it. I mean if a thread is popular, many people will view it - some may bookmark it, some may not. There will be a direct proportionality between the two. We already have a function here that filters threads (within a single section or sub-section) based on the views it has. It's more or less the same.
I wouldn't be encouraging Shawn to add more to the page when the browser does it well anyway but I get your point about keeping up with people. Did you know you can follow users? May or may not help, depending on how many you follow.
Wait, I think I got your point now! Do you mean introduce the bookmarking feature in the users' forum accounts itself?? This means you can bookmark all important threads from your account and the bookmarks themselves will be saved in your account just as you can save the list of all watched threads/forums. If yes, that would really be a nice feature to have. I'm all for it. This way, the bookmarks will be accessible anywhere, anytime and from any device – at least wherever there's a working internet connection. So the guy you saw on your mobile and wanna badly hire won't be lost in space after switching to a laptop. Moreover, hunting for age-old threads will not be a daunting task anymore as you'll be able to locate them in a flash! Brilliant idea @matt_62. Frankly speaking, I don't see any structural changes happening until Shawn is back. But if you ask me, this is definitely something I feel should be included in the to-do list on a high priority.