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Twitter has to be a top three tool for professional bloggers. We use Twitter all day for our work. We use it for getting a pulse of breaking news, particular topics we find of interest and to let people know about our posts. We use it for a lot more than that, too, but that's a pretty fair overview.

Twitter Lists are often a good source when following a particular topic. If nothing else, the conversation in the list can help with other searches.

We were hoping Twitter would announce some improved functionality for lists at its event today, which it did not, but we did find out about this new third-party Twitter app.

One of the things Twitter founders emphasized today was that it's okay to use Twitter to passively consume content, which is where lists become really useful. Lists have become crucial to avoid missing important tweets and extracting the most interesting information from your stream. Formulists lets you automate the labor-intensive process of list curation.

According to Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow involved in Google's real-time search efforts, the way the company ranks Twitter updates in its search results is "definitely, definitely" more than a popularity contest. This quote came during an interview with MIT's Technology Review where Singhal stressed Google's focus on a Twitter user's overall reputation as a ranking measurement as opposed to simply tallying follower counts. That being said, it still sounds as if Google rewards Twitter's more popular users - that is, the heavily followed accounts on the service. Not only do these accounts have more value than many others, they have a lot of power, too. According to Singhal, when a popular user follows someone else, that other person's reputation increases as well.

Favrd, a site which aggregated the most popular starred tweets, has closed down. The site was a favorite of Twitter humorists, people who use Twitter mainly to express their wit. Favrd was the first of its kind to repurpose Twitter favorites (stars) into an aggregation site, where users could see who had "faved" their tweets, view tweets with 3 or more faves as a real-time feed, and check the most faved tweets in a 24-hour period on the Leaderboard. It was kind of like the Techmeme of funny tweets.

Through the bravery and efforts of people such as our good friend Drew Olanoff and the LIVESTRONG campaign, many social media users are much more aware of cancer and what this disease does to the body, mind, soul and community.

Today, on World AIDS Day, we'd like to direct your attention to a few folks on the social web who are facing lives with HIV/AIDS and have made the same brave choice to share that experience with the rest of us. Read on for bits and pieces of their stories as well as feeds and lists that will keep their struggles and triumphs in your thoughts.

TweetDeck, the most popular third-party Twitter client on the market today, just got a major update. TweetDeck now features support for Twitter lists and Twitter's new geolocation feature, as well as a LinkedIn column and optional support for Twitter's new retweet function. Users who prefer to use old-style retweets can still use these as well. For now, TweetDeck geolocation feature doesn't allow you to update your location from the desktop. This feature will soon be part of TweetDeck's iPhone app, which will be updated in the next few weeks.

Seesmic just announced the launch of Twitter lists in its browser-based Seesmic Web Twitter client. Earlier this week, Seesmic released the first desktop Twitter client with support for lists. Despite Seesmic's best efforts, Brizzly managed to become the first company to release a web client with support for lists earlier today. Seesmic Web offers another first for web-based Twitter clients, however: support for Twitter's geolocation API.

Twitter rolled out its new lists feature to all users on Friday. Today, Seesmic will launch the first desktop client with support for lists. For now, this early release will only go out to users who sign up for Team Seesmic, the company's semi-private beta-test group. We got a chance to test an early build of Seesmic with the lists feature over the last two days and it already changed the way we use Twitter. Seesmic plans to ship this preview version later today.

Twitter Lists have rolled out to a majority of users on the site now and the uptake has been remarkable. Things will get truly interesting when lists can by turned into columns in 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic (one small client says it's shipped list support already and Tweetdeck says it's coming soon), when you can share items with particular lists exclusively (like you can on Facebook) and when you can search inside particular lists. Anyone who's worked with OPML files before is likely to find Twitter lists frustrating so far.

Let's operate under the assumption that Twitter's own implementation of lists will be overshadowed by more useful implementations of the lists API. In order to help you get ready for that future, here are ten lists we think particularly worth following.