Keep Your Friends Organized: Twitter Expands Lists Beta
Twitter rolled out a limited beta of its new lists feature to a larger number of users late last night. With these new lists, Twitter users can now organize their friends into groups. By default, these lists are private, but one of the most interesting aspects of this new feature is that users can also make their lists public - something many Twitter users have been looking forward to for a long time.
Third-party Twitter clients and tools like TweepML, TweetDeck, Brizzly, Nambu and others all offer their own implementation of this feature, though Twitter also gave early API access to this feature to a number of third-party developers.
Currently, adding friends to a list is still a bit cumbersome and either involves a lot of clicks from a user's profile page or a visit to the 'following' page. The list of users you follow, however, is organized in chronological order, so finding users on this list is quite hard.
One interesting aspect of this feature is that a user's profile will now also show a section that highlights the public lists a user was added to. This could have some interesting social ramifications. After all, Twitter's emphasis on follower counts has already created a bit of a popularity contest and now being part of a certain list that is being curated by the right person could add yet another dimension to this issue.
Of course, these new lists will open up avenues for a new products as well. Third-party tools, for example, can now look at the public lists and maybe create new algorithms to rank a user's authority on Twitter.
Import/Export
Of course, these are still the early days for Twitter lists, but hopefully we will also soon see a feature in third-party clients like TweetDeck that will allow users to export their existing lists or import their new lists from Twitter. Chances are that this is just a matter of time and this will probably be a default option in third-party clients once Twitter rolls this feature out to the majority of its users.
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I never understood why Twitter did not offer this feature from the beginning. As we see from, e.g., the Trending Topics feature, the team is obviously unable to algorithmically analyze what people are semantically talking about. The problem can be partially approached by creating such lists because people will manually create and maintain lists that group people which create a semantically similar output. We are talking about business intelligence here.
This sounds like it will be a great feature. I wonder how long it will be before they offer it to everyone. I "assume" that if you are not part of the select group that can create lists that you can't view someone else's list either. Looking forward to using this!
-Ileane
Larger issue - What do the third party developers think when they do all the development leg work only to have the "mother ship" appropriate it? ( Tweetdeck spent months on their implementation of "lists" ).
Everyone freaks out when Apple does this to their their party app developers, why is Twitter getting a pass?
This is a cool feature, but some Twitter already allow you to create groups, which act as “lists”.
This is exciting because it will provide a centralized place to create, manage, and follow “lists”.
fdsadf47@yahoo.com
I use a combo of HootSuite and TweetDeck. I wonder, too, as Todd has asked, how 3rd party developers feel. I guess that is the risk you take. Curious if they ever get paid or brought on board?
NOW, when will they have a built-in URL shortener?
Steve
@stevenschlagel
This is one of the main features I found lacking in Twitter for ages & I spent ages trying to find 3rd party apps that implemented this well with limited success.
I am glad they implemented it and seems I was one of the lucky few to get access to it last week. Trouble is, after creating my lists and telling everyone to go see them, lots of my followers were unable to look at them, simply getting a blank white page with no explanation. I think this was bad planning for the roll-out on Twitter's part. I think really everyone should have been able to see lists up-front, even if they couldn't create them and if not even that, then to have a default go to page explaining that the reason the user can't see the page yet is because it's a limited beta.
Beyond this initial gripe, I am a little concerned that this is going to make Twitter's spamming problem worse, by making it easier for the spammers to locate target groups and spam the hell out of them (it won't be long before they've figured out bots that can scrape these lists).
Also, this whole idea of how many times you've been "listed", is going to become another one of those Twitter status/boasting symbols that's actually pretty easy to rack up once you have a bunch of bot-run Twitter accounts.
I'm still generally positive about this development though, even with the above niggles.
An interesting post. And I agree with the comment by Alex T. There are a few problems with Lists (I too have had problems with trying to share my lists with others who weren't invited to the initial testing ). I also think the spamming issue might get worse.
However for me the main problem is that when I view a list there is no quick way of identifying what it is those in the list do and why they merit being in the list.
If it's a list of any length it will be too time consuming to view everyone's profile.
Of course this is what the testing phase is all about...