Twitter co-founder Ev Williams said as much when he talked about the new feature – which the company rolled out in wide beta yesterday – at the recent Online News Association conference in San Francisco.

Twitter has been working behind the scenes on a Lists feature for some time, but this is the first glimpse of it most of its millions of users have had.

The Lists feature lets users organize followers into groups that other Twitter users can see and follow. It’s like the TweetDeck groups function  – only better, because it can be shared.

A Lists tab now appears in the right-hand features column on a Twitter user’s profile page, along with Trending Topics, Saved Searches and Followers.

To create a list, click on the New List link and give the new list you’re creating a name. You can then add followers to it by clicking on a person’s Twitter user name and then on the Lists button that appears at the top of their profile page to the left of the tools button. Clicking on the Lists button opens a drop-down menu that displays every list you’ve created, which allows you to add someone to one or more lists. The List feature also lets you create a new list anytime you pull up someone’s profile page.

Another key feature of the List function: you can can keep lists private or make them public, in which case anyone on the network can see what lists you’ve created and who’s on them. People can also sign up to follow your lists – more on how that could be a good thing for journalists and other writers in a minute.

According to Williams, the potential uses for Twitter lists are huge. “We created a list of people who work at Twitter,” he told a SRO crowd at the  October ONA conference in San Francisco. “You could do a list of funny people, favorite journalists, and as a way to crowdsource. You could have a list of everyone at this conference to see what they were saying. It’s about controlling the information flow.”

Not every Twitter user is going to go to the trouble of creating lists – for one thing, if you’re following hundreds or thousands of people on Twitter, creating lists and then categorizing all those people into one or more of them could take hours (unless somebody designs an app for that though I’m not sure how they’d do that).

But Williams expects that journalists will be among the number that do. “Jouranlists will curate these lists. That would be a value add, just like editing is,” he told the convention audience.

Twitter’s List function is the latest evidence that the service is best thought of as a network, not a destination, Williams says. It’s an underlying technology that other companies will use to build stuff on – like many Twitter app builders already do. “The list content will be available through the API and through widgets that journalists or media organizations can take and put on their site and integrate in interesting ways,” he says. ” That will make it much more powerful.”

Two weeks passed between the time I heard Williams talk at ONA and the Lists feature went into wide beta, giving me plenty of time to think about how I’d start using the service when it came out. At least initially, I’m using it to segment the people and organizations I follow on the network into the following categories, which you can see on MichelleRafter’s Lists:

• Subjects I write about on a regular basis, including tech, finance, small business, workplace issues and media
• Fellow freelance writers
• News people and organizations
• Portland people, places and events
• A feed for this blog

Other journalists, writers and bloggers are using it in different ways. Here are a few examples:

Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com, a blog about search engines, set up lists for each of the major search engine providers he writes about, Google and Microsoft, as well as for other subjects he writes about, such as search marketing and social media. If you clicked on any of those links, you’d have discovered they take you right to that list – which means you can share them on blogs like this one, and on Twitter (as in, ‘Hey, check out this cool list Danny Sullivan published called @DannySullivan/Potpourri‘)

Robert Scoble, aka The Scobelizer, the noted Silicon Valley techie blogger and hard-core Twitter user, has already created 20 lists, which is the maximum number any one person can create right now, including one for People I have met – a substitute for keeping sources’ business cards perhaps? – and another for analysts that track subjects he follows. Scoble also follows 20 lists created by other people, including a couple from Danny Sullivan, but also a list of entrepreneurs created by Twitter product designer Vitor Lourenco.

Josh Weinberger, managing editor of CRM magazine, a computer industry trade publication, created a list for conferences and trade shows he’s attended, going to attend or just curious about; PR people he deals with, and The New Yorker, for when he wants to do a little light reading.

These examples are from hard-core tech geeks. But they’re not the only writer types who could benefit from using Twitter lists.

This morning I read Matea Gold’s Los Angeles Times story, Demi v. Perez? See Twitter, on the celebrity feuds taking place on the microblogging network. Gold, the paper’s TV reporter, could easily set up lists to track broadcast and cable TV networks, TV show fan websites, and in the case of today’s story, actress Demi Moore, blogger Perez Hilton and the other celebs mentioned.

Are you using Twitter Lists? If so, I’d love to hear how you’re using them for research, reporting or other writing-related activities.

Write on a regular basis, pick topics people care about and be upfront about relationships you have with sponsors.

That’s some of the advice I shared in a 3 Questions column I wrote in yesterday’s Orange County Register. The column is regular Sunday feature compiled by the paper’s real estate columnist and my former colleague Jonathan Lanser.

Read the whole thing here.

Then I started using Twitter.

And never stopped. For the last eight months I’ve tweeted every day, with the occasional weekend off. I tweet eight, 10, 12 times a day: when I put up a new blog post, when one of my stories is published, when I need a source, when a random thought simply needs to be shared – though in hindsight some of those would have been better left unsaid.

Until last week.

I took an honest-to-goodness vacation away from email, blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn and everything connected to being connected.

Guess what?

The sky didn’t fall. The earth stayed on its axis. And the bottom didn’t fall out of my business – I even had a few assignments in my inbox when I got back.

It was easier than I thought to unplug. It helped to be stuck with the middle of nowhere, the only available Internet access whatever could be siphoned off a neighbor’s unsecured wireless connection.

Going without was good for the soul and apparently didn’t hurt my standing on Twitter – I returned to a few dozen new followers.

So how to unplug?

Tell people you’re leaving. If you stop tweeting without explanation, followers may think you’ve given up on Twitter. Give them a head’s up. If you don’t want to broadcast the fact that you’re leaving town for safety reasons, be a bit cagey about what you’re doing. “I’ll be taking a break from here for the next few days” works. So does “Busy elsewhere. See everyone in a week.”

Automate. If you can’t bear going a whole week without saying something, use a tool such as TweetLater or TwitResponse to send tweets at predesignated intervals in your absence.

Go mobile. Leave your laptop home and tweet from your iPhone or BlackBerry using an application like Twitterrific, PocketTweets or TwitterBerry. Twitter’s applications list has a lot more.

Tweet from vacation, sparingly. Who wants to spend their precious downtime tethered to a machine, even if it’s only a cell phone? Limit the number of times you log on. Or allow yourself a specific time of day or amount of time to check in, update your status and upload vacation pics.

Then go play.

Got your own story of going off the social media grid? Share!

A full house of close to 60 people packed the Living Room Theaters space to learn about LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media tools companies are using to do product research, reach out to customers and recruit employees. We shared lots of examples of how companies are putting social media into action, and what can happen when tools like Twitter get misused.

As promised, I’m providing some of the resources I used during our discussion. If you were at our meetup, thanks for coming – I’d love to continue our conversation on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you weren’t there, reading some of following will give you a taste of what we talked about.

Resources: I compiled a list of Websites and stories about how companies are using social media on Delicious, the social bookmarking service. To see them you need an account, which you can get by signing up here. Then do the following:

• Go to Network
• Go to Add a user to Network.
• Type in my user name, “michellerafter”. Click on my user name to see my bookmarks.
• Do a keyword search for “WillametteMBA” to see Websites I bookmarked especially for the First Thursday meetup. Happy reading.

Follow me: If you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to follow me on Twitter at @michellerafter. On LinkedIn, I’m Michelle Vranizan Rafter. Watch for my stories about social media in Workforce Management, an HR industry trade magazine; Inc.’s tech website, IncTechnology.com; and on two websites for consumers, YourSecurityResource.com and TheGeekWeekly.com.

Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years of covering this topic:

Michelle’s Social Media Maxims

1. Everybody’s doing it, but not everybody knows what they’re doing. There’s no right way or wrong way to use social media, only the best way for what you or your company wants to accomplish.

2. You don’t need to know everything, but it helps to know people who do or who know at least a little more than you. The great thing about social media is you can find experts or resources on just about everything, and add to the giant pool of knowledge as you learn.

3. It’s all about the conversation – Business today is a two-way street. The one-to-many broadcast model is outdated – just ask newspapers about that. Customers and suppliers want to have conversations with you. Figure how the best way to make that happen.

4. It’s not about the tools, it’s how you use them. You don’t need the fastest, newest, zippiest stuff, despite what the IT department tells you. Use what works for you. Twitter is great but it’s also gotten people in trouble.

5. Have a plan – and make sure everybody knows what it is. If you’re blogging, podcasting or tweeting on the company’s behalf, know what you can and can’t talk about. Companies should revise guidelines to include social media and make sure employees know the drill.

6. You don’t have to be 25 to get it, or to get a job doing it. Let people who don’t know life without the Internet do what they know. Let people who’ve been around since before there was an Internet lend perspective.

7. Teach your boss what you learn, you’ll be a hero.

8. When in doubt, ask your ‘friends’ – but first make sure you have some. Create a profile on LinkedIn, sign up for Twitter. Invite colleagues, former colleagues, suppliers, people you know from associations or trade groups join you. When you have a problem, throw it out to the crowd. Make sure you don’t give away company secrets or initiatives that’ll get you in trouble.

9. Borrow from the best – why reinvent the wheel when you can learn from others who’ve already done it.

10. If I can do it, you can too.