Twitter Lists
Let me say first that I don’t think that there is any right way to use Twitter. These are just a few thoughts after having been lucky enough to be in the first group of the Twitter Lists feature rollout.
My initial inclination was to create a couple of lists for people that I don’t follow, but every once and a while I might want to skim their tweets and see what they are doing (e.g., other political scientists). But interestingly enough, another person with whom I discussed the feature was creating a list of people whose tweets that they wanted to make sure didn’t get lost among all the other tweets.
These are different approaches (and not mutually exclusive since you can create many lists). But both ways allow for de facto hierarchies of people you might want to “follow.” Either approach lowers the cost of following people that you might not want to pay too much attention. By increasing the number of followers (either traditionally or through list-based following), Twitter is increasing the number of ties that people might form which should increase overall network density. But they are also introducing software to help people give different levels of attention to different twitterers. Most people following a large enough group probably don’t read each person they follow with equal intensity, but lists are a tool to manage the gaggle.
I understand that there are different Twitter clients that have lists, but those lists were always going to be limited. Limited in their mass appeal and bound to a particular client. Some friends of mine have also been following celebrity twitter feeds via RSS. This doesn’t solve any of the problems associated with client-based lists and has the detrimental effect of pulling them out of Twitter and reducing the likelihood that they’ll participate in furthering the conversation. Besides (and this probably deserves it’s own post), I’m constantly amazed how few people use of RSS feeds — even by people that are intelligent and news hungry types.
By embracing lists (and eventually extending the API), Twitter once again challenges developers to figure out the best ways to present tweets. Twitter has already bested client-based list implementations by making users’ lists shareable and follow-able. This would allow someone like John Gruber, of Daring Fireball fame, to curate a list (or lists) of Mac and web nerdery. He’s already sharing a list called “fun bunch,” but I don’t think you can see it if the lists feature hasn’t been added to your Twitter account.
My good friend Seth Jolly wants to think of lists as bookmarks. But these are live bookmarks since the content is always being updated.
Lists as live bookmarks will probably hold the most potential during events that we want to share with other people. The other night I mentioned how much fun it was to follow John Gruber and Joe Sheehan during Game 5 of the ALCS. People will now be able to easily create lists of baseball fans to follow during games, political junkies to follow during debates and election nights, and colleagues to follow during conferences and conventions. And while these occasional lists might generate a lot of utility during specific occasions, it’s understandable that you might not want to follow all of these people all of the time or go to the trouble to add and subtract them before and after each event. With Twitter Lists it’s a one time thing to create the list and then ignore it most of the time. You might not even need to create the list yourself. All you need to do is find a person who has already put together a pretty good list.
