USB Memory Sticks for TM Backups?

Has anybody ever tried using a large USB memory stick as a nicely-portable Time-Machine backup drive?
In high-level concept it seems like it would be possible, but I seem to recall that a TM backup drive needs to be formatted in a certain particular way (MacOS Extended Journaled, as I recall), so perhaps not.

Flash drives simply don't have the capacity to function as a TM backup drive. Of course you can certainly use one but they are slow and small. They are useful to carry some data about but they are not intended to replace a hard drive. TM is not intended to maintain portable backups. Though it can be used in that way, it's not really designed for such a purpose.
Reasonably priced flash drives are available in capacities up to 16 GBs, but going above that is impractical both because of cost and lack of size over 32 GBs.
A full system backup requires at least 8 GBs of space. Since an 8 GB flash drive only formats to slightly less than 7.5 GBs, you would need to start with a 16 GB flash drive as a minimum.

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