Posted on October 16, 2009 - by Justin Hartman
Twitter introduces lists and becomes a lot more useful
Twitter have today started rolling out a Beta feature to select users called Lists. To me this is the most useful feature that Twitter have added since they launched. I’ve had my Twitter account since March 2007 and during that time I’ve accumulated a whole bunch of followers. The problem with this is that Twitter has, over time, become far too noisy for me and I’ve lost my ability to follow what’s going on.
As a result I’ve used Twitter more for updating than for following but Lists now change this. As you can see from my sidebar I can now create both public and private lists. This means that I can now create a private list just for friends and instead of seeing all the noise I can just view stuff from people that actually matter to me – my friends.
You can also see that I have created an Afrigator Team list. This list I made public so anyone can view this list and follow it if they want to. As with following individual Twitter profiles you can now follow a list and be updated on that lists stream which is pretty useful. What lists also do is allow you to know who are part of a team. Twitter have a team list as well so you can now follow people from a company or cause that matter to you.
Twitter has just become a whole lot more useful to me and I think it’s a game-changer! How many of you have access to Twitter Lists?
8 Comments
I'd love to hear yours!
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October 16, 2009
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TG they finally caught up….most of the apps – Tweetdeck / Seesmic etc have offered grouping options for quite a while.
Makes a huge diff when you’re trying to listen to a specific few in the crowd. I suspect twitter will continue to innovate their web interface to attract the 3rd party App users back.
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October 16, 2009
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Interesting that you mention trying to get 3rd party app users back to the site. Reason being, @stii noticed that Twitter haven’t got any API documentation on the lists functionality yet they have “other” documentation for upcoming API features.
Makes me wonder now if this list functionality is going to be released to 3rd party developers or not.
I’d hope they do because I still prefer desktop applications to clicking refresh on a page…
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October 16, 2009
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Looks really great. Wonder how long they will keep it in Beta for?
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October 16, 2009
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Isn’t halve the problem with noise this strange habit of following those who follow you. I follow you because you are interesting and then I got a request to follow me back – which I found strange. Why did you do that? (I declined your request)
Now with lists you will be able to put those you want to follow into a list. And those who you don’t want to follow will be in another list. If you follow me …
Shouldn’t you just be following your friends only in the first place?
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October 16, 2009
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@Alan I have no idea….
@Ian – I don’t think I understand what you mean about the following back issue?
There is no wrong or right way to use Twitter. Some only follow a select few, others follow everyone who follow them. I’m somewhere inbetween – I checkout all my followers before I follow back. I don’t like to follow spammers for example. With lists I can continue on this strategy but also filter the people I follow.
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October 17, 2009
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Wow! Good News! I agree with you, Twitter has become very noisy along with a lot of spam accounts! This feature is very welcome!
Since I have no access to it yet, can you tell us if it’s like “communities” on Gatorpeeps?
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October 19, 2009
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I can’t see anything so I assume only people included on the Beta can. I’ll keep my eye out..
I can see this being VERY useful as my following count keeps climbing bit by bit.
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October 28, 2009
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I expect them to come up with a feature to temporarily hide the tweets from certain people. I checked out brizzly.com, and they seem to have a best forward-integration of twitter.