ReadWriteWeb

Twitter Lists are a beautiful thing, but the company limits what users can do with them. Presumably because of scaling challenges and a perceived lack of user interest, users who want to group together Twitter accounts into topical lists are only allowed to create 20 lists per account and each list can contain no more than 500 members.

Unless you are Twitter itself, that is. We wrote one month ago that Twitter's own staff list had hit the maximum number of members, 500. (It's not an unpopular list, either, almost 77K people are subscribed to it.) What would happen if Twitter hired more people, we asked? Would these limits be lifted for other users as well? Well, it turns out that the Twitter staff list is now at 545, another incredible growth of 10% in 30 days, and the list feature's limit appears not to apply in this case. Think these limits aren't important? Try making a list of employees at any large company, or of Women in Tech, or of People in Portland, Oregon.

Twitter's hundreds of millions of members include casual and professional users with a wide range of interests. There's no better way to dive deep into real-time discussion on a particular topic than by building or subscribing to a Twitter List made of people focused on a particular field.

This super-powerful feature of Twitter has been available for more than 18 months but remains severely limited and underdeveloped. Users aren't allowed to create more than 20 lists per account and each list is limited to 500 members. Those are just the limitations - there's a world of other possibilities that could be developed if Twitter HQ was really as excited about Lists as it ought to be. Unfortunately, as you can see from the infographic above, Twitter's hundreds of employees don't include any power users of Lists. Earlier this month Twitter's own List of staff members hit the 500 person limit, though! Might that be an impetus for the company to change things for everyone?

Perhaps you won't believe me since it's my job to spread the gospel of curation as the Chief Evangelist of Pearltrees, but I think curation is here to stay. These are the reasons why I believe this is the case.

This year there has been a tremendous amount of buzz in Silicon Valley about curation. Magnify.net CEO Steven Rosenbaum recently published a book, Curation Nation that has sparked a tremendous amount of conversation on the topic. Likewise a post by Brian Solis has been retweeted thousands of times. My company, Pearltrees has just surpassed 100,000 curators and 10 million page views a month, and in the past two years nearly a dozen companies that incorporate digital curation into their models have launched.

With the amount of news available online, aggregation and curation are becoming increasingly important for finding, filtering and managing information. Of course news no longer emanates solely from traditional media sources or even from blogs. Much of it now comes from social streams as well, and oftentimes the news, analysis, and reactions via sites like Twitter are stories unto themselves.

That's created a lot of opportunities for new sorts of digital storytelling, and one of the tools that the writers here at ReadWriteWeb have had in their toolbox is Storify. The website opens to public beta today.

Sulia a startup dedicated to helping people find relevant content and users on Twitter, has just announced that it is working with Twitter in order to deliver "premium streams" of Twitter content. Distribution partners so far include Flipboard, The Washington Post, TweetDeck, and The Wall Street Journal.

Despite all the recent hoopla about the Twitter ecosystem becoming unfriendly to third-party developers and startups, as Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson points out, Sulia may be just "the kind of partner Twitter doesn't want to kill."

That's because Sulia offers an important service built on top of Twitter that seems to be beneficial to all parties involved - users, publishers and Twitter.

I spent much of my fourth consecutive year at the South by Southwest Interactive festival capturing tweets, photos and other moments from the thousands of people in attendance. To accomplish this, I used curation platform Storify, which incidentally won this year's SXSWi Startup Accelerator competition for news technologies. Although still in private beta, Storify is getting a lot of well-deserved notice.

One of the issues Digg has always struggled with is that it can take quite a while before a breaking news story hits the front page. Waiting for enough users to vote a story up can sometimes take a few hours and in this age of real-time breaking news, Digg's lag doesn't make it an attractive destination for news junkies. Now, Digg is trying to change this by adding an editorial layer to some parts of the site. Starting today, Digg will add a breaking news/interesting stories module that will be managed and curated by Digg's community team. This team will aggregate stories that they think should be on the Digg front page but haven't garnered enough votes by the community yet.

Yesterday, at Apple's "Back to the Mac" press event, the company announced an App Store for the Mac, similar to the stores it already runs for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad within iTunes. There's no doubt a computer-based "app store" is an interesting concept, and it will likely attract developers because of the exposure it provides, not to mention the hassles it eliminates - like dealing with credit card processing, or paying for hosting and bandwidth bills.

As with the iTunes App Store, developers receive the standard 70/30 (developer/Apple) revenue split on app sales. Also like the iTunes App Store, Apple has created a long list of apps it plans to reject.

Curation is currently one of "the chosen" buzz words in the social media zeitgeist (that's another). But as abundant as the talk of curation is, actual curation tools have been in relatively short order.

In recent weeks, I've been experimenting with some newly released curation platforms. The first, Curated.by, lets you capture tweets around a specific topic using a plug-in that's installed on your Twitter.com profile. You can then easily tag and sort tweets into "bundles," which can then be embedded in a blog post for some additional context to whatever you're reporting on.

Social bookmarking sites like Delicious are useful for collecting bookmarks, but they don't allow users to really draw connections and tell stories. That's where curation-focused services like Pearltrees and Trailmeme come in. Trailmeme, which we first looked at in December, was incubated at Xerox and launches at DEMO this week. It allows users to bookmark sites and then organize them in tidy diagrams, making it easy to highlight the relationship between different items and for readers to browse these links.