Favorites is an in-development, one might say kind of radical feature. It is being developed out loud and in public (mostly) on feature branches. Adopters of uPortal 4.1 / Respondr will not be required to use this feature.
This feature is being developed (primarily?) by UW-Madison for use in the redesigned UW-Madison portal.
Favorites is a different way of interacting with layout.
Instead of thinking about tabs and organization of portlets within columns on tabs (a dashboard-centric view), favorites thinks about favoriting individual portlets and collections of portlets (a one-portlet-at-a-time-maximized-centric view).
Instead of adding portlets to one's layout, with Favorites, users add a portlet to their favorites.
Talk is cheap, where's the code?
Feature branch for favorites portlet: https://github.com/Jasig/uPortal/tree/UP-3896
Feature branch off of the favorites branch, implementing un-favoriting: https://github.com/Jasig/uPortal/tree/unfavorite_from_favorites_portlet
Got mockups / screenshots?
Yes.