Webnomena

This week, Twitter opened the new twitter lists features to the public. I had a chance to play with lists for some time now (I was fortunate to see it a little early). In my opinion, it will take some time to fully understand the true meaning and implications of this new feature, the same way that it took us time to understand twitter. Basically, twitter added another level of abstraction between users and their following timelines (now, it is one to many) and that made things a little more interesting. Here are some of my initial thoughts.

What lists show us?

1. Now we can see what the others see. Before lists, no two twitter users shared the same timeline view. This new capability opens the possibilities to do remote, join tweeting looking at the very same timline.
2. Now we can see how our tweets are seen by others – maybe we over tweet? or a misfit? try following a list containing your twitter user name.
3. The list name shows how people categorize us (how are they thinking about us).  Check the lists that you are listed on: Authors/readers/reviewers, thought leaders/journalist/bloggers, funny.

Other observations about Twitter lists:

1. Lists value depreciate with their size -  a small focused list will provide better content than a long list ( a long one is not much better than your timeline)
2. Counter intuitive to item #1 – for some reason bigger lists gain more followers
3. If you spent the time building a great focused list then upload it to Listorious (kudos for the quick turnaround of this website). It could help to promote your username adding to your twitter presence. Tag it appropriately to be found.
4. Lists are another great example for the huge power of crowdsourcing when it comes to organizing large amount of data (the grid computing paradigm). In comparison think about the TweetDeck twitter groups creating feature. Creating a list is a tedious process, keeping those private is a waste. Thanks to Twitter lists and Listorious we have a kind of new and organized real-time search engine in under a week.
5. Are we going to see #ListFollowFriday meme soon? E.g #ListFollowFriday @ravenme/iphone The best iPhone app developers
6. The next step is making list creation easier. I like to see a merge list option. The merge will create a new list that is a set of users from the original two lists.
7. Another next step is adding to the best twitter desktop clients out there the option to upload lists.
8. Getting a little wild here: in Twitter Search Advance Options, add search by lists, and search with the option to exclude list or lists.

All in all I think that the twitter lists feature is great. Lists will help getting rid of spammers, finding new communities, getting better content quality, and will introduce an infinite tweets timelines to follow.

Your thoughts?

Picture credit to Irargerich

GO LISTS