Twitter wants its new Lists feature “to go nuts.”
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.
One word: FINALLY.