Twitter has just announced a new feature that is sure to excite anyone who has been waiting for the site to offer an alternative to its Suggested User List. Appropriately called ‘Lists’, the new feature will allow anyone to make a list of other Twitter users and label it appropriately (for example, I could make a list called ‘TC Staff’), then share that list with other members. Twitter writes that the feature is still in limited testing, but that it will eventually be rolled out to all users.
By default any lists you create will be public, though you’ll also be able to hide them. If you choose to leave them publicly viewable, other Twitter users will be able to hit a button to “Follow this list” so they can add everyone at once. This is a big deal — until now the only convenient way to start mass following people on Twitter has been to use its own curated SUL. I won’t be surprised if we see some users vying to become the best ‘list makers’, offering comprehensive lists of celebrities, news portals, bloggers, and more. It will also be interesting to see if Twitter aggregates the most comprehensive Lists and includes them as part of the signup process (which would effectively just be the SUL in a different form).
Twitter’s post describing the new feature isn’t particularly detailed, but it seems like this may have a larger impact than just discovery — it could also potentially be used for Grouping, a feature that some third party apps have offered but that hasn’t been officially supported by Twitter. In short, this will let you group the people you follow into different list (say, one for News, one for close friends, and so on), and then quickly jump between them. Twitter will be supporting the new listing feature through its API, so we can likely expect this functionality to be extended to most third party applications that don’t already support grouping.
Also worth noting: a logical extension to grouping will be to support search within groups, which could help users weed out spam. Of course this is Twitter we’re talking about, so it could still be quite a while before we see this happen.
‘Lists’ may compete with sites like WeFollow that specialize in listing top Twitter users in various categories (on the other hand, these sites could actually become even more popular if they become the best places to find the most comprehensive Lists). It’s also likely going to replace TweepML, the open standard format for sharing groups of Twitter users.
Update: Twitter’s Jason Goldman clarifies that you do not have to follow everyone that you add to a list.
I hope this will keep @scobleizer from flooding my twitter stream with SUL complaints.
Finally!
Totally Agree dude!!! I bet Robert Scoble is happy too!
Wow!! This a great new feature, one I’ve wanted for some time … looking forward to using it asap. Hey Twitter, let me play! @markjeffrey
Ditto. Looking forward to the search within the groups as well. Cool!
Wouldn’t sites like WeFollow benefit from this? They could then allow people to subscribe to their dynamically updated lists.
Good point, assuming Twitter allows this. I’ll update the post.
On the flip side this could also give the ability for other sites to come in and easily copy WeFollow.
Even Twitter may be using this feature to quickly copy and improve on the concept of WeFollow.
I am going to guess Twitter directory sites such as WeFollow have their days numbered.
It’s lists in the Facebook sense (groups as you’ve described them) that I think the majority of people would welcome first before you make it easier to follow new people.
I think it’s great that Twitter are taking a step away from their KISS philosophy, but unless groups are added too, this feels like it helps Twitter more by boosting the number of people everyone follows (and thus giving people a reason to visit more often) than its users, by providing more organizational tools for the followers they already have.
As a fellow twit I feel the same way.
But I think the proposed list feature serves the strategic purpose of making it EASY for newbies to start seeing the value in Twitter very quickly. Much faster than building and organizing your own groups around certain topics. For those of us who did it the old fashioned way, it’s a fact that finding good people to follow and then grouping them takes quite a bit of time, patience and effort.
Related thought, it would be cool to start with a public list and be able to prune group members who you don’t like, in effect creating your own custom and tailored list/group.
no need to wait for this. Twitter Lists are up now. Great commentary and context too… really allows you to get a good idea of why people are following others. Example: Tara Hunt’s List for Karaoke lovers http://www.lunc...overs-1001.html
to try it… http://www.lunc...TwitterEditList
It’s about time although Lists was an after thought with Facebook and I still don’t think people get how to use them. Twitter need to make this easy to implement, visible and user friendly so that anyone can configure!
So here I am sitting at my desk adding final touches on an application I am launching tonight. It is built on the premise that there is no way to create lists of twitter users, attribute particular tags and then share with fellow twitter users. I decided to create an application to perform that functionality. Enter http://twilister.com, set to launch tonight as per my tweets indicate: http://twitter....atus/4479870398 and http://twitter....atus/4479766786
However, one of my good friends just sent me a message with this blog post informing me that I am screwed. I am at ends what to do here – perhaps tech crunch users can advise. Apparently I am full of damn good ideas because they seem to keep getting integrated into twitter (my last application was also scrapped because it performed the same features as saved searches)
Moral of the story..act..quickly!
Moral of the story: Don’t wait until there’s a hundred other sites doing what you plan on doing. You’re far from the first to make such a site.
this is what I have done with http://www.baatey.com – you can create a ‘label’ for twitter users u follow such as ’sports’, ‘family’, ‘religion’, ‘bollywood’ and also put followers in multiple lists. example, when u start following someone on twitter thru baatey.com u can add label(s) and labels come on ur main page to help organize tweets from people u follow.
i do like the idea of making this ‘label’ public so other’s can subscribe to it… overall great step from twitter.
Check out a live Twitter list product, that Lunch.com launched today … which lets you include commentary on exactly why you recommend each follow. Tara Hunt (@missrogue) posted the debut list today: http://lunch.com/t/k8o
Plus you have the context of of Lunch’s Similarity Network, for additional perspective on the recommendations and how they’re relevant to you.
Make your own Twitter List on Lunch, here:
http://www.lunc...TwitterEditList
This reminds me of: http://tweepml.org/
This will become the de facto standard for groups, and about time. Even though there’s no direct support for subscribing to the list (in the sense of receiving all tweets from anyone in the list), Twitter has done the most important thing by establishing an undisputed standard place for groups in the cloud.
Those of us who use groups on our Twitter clients will finally be able to switch clients seamlessly without having to reconstruct the group again. That functionally did come late in the day with TweetDeck, but now it’s going to be an open format that will let us use different clients for different needs.
Someone please explain how this will “throttle” spammers from simply autofollowing lists?
Because honestly? This is just ripe for abuse.
Why troll the public feed when you can just go auto-add dozens at a time?
Ha Ha, they’re well on their way to competing with their developer community.
Wow. A Twitter post NOT by MG?
Could I use this to create a list of people from one town or city?
The one feature I want is for twitter to add a “read” property to it’s api. That way no matter what twitter client I use, it will know which tweets I have “read”.
Did they just kill Yammer with this feature?
seems to me it means the end of :
1. natural following : you check your friends followers list, and cherry pick the user you want to follow
2. reciprocal (?) following : you get a notification that someone is following you (via topify or twitter itself), you check back the account and if you like it, you follow the user back.
Now, what kind of msg will twitter send you ? “You’re followed by @techcrunch who found you on “twitterbozos list” ?
i.e. : will it be possible to block one’s own account so that it can NOT be included in lists ?
Second, related question : number limits :
- how many accounts can you add on a list ?
- when adding a list, will you be able to follow 1000 ppl in one click ?
spammers rejoice !
When will they allow groups like in tweetdeck? So you can select which stream you want to see. I basically don’t use Twitter anymore because there is no good way to filter it on site.
They are leaning on others to create the useful functionality. Not a fan.
As a creator of a twitter grouping client (http://tweetarium.com) I see this feature making my life a whole lot easier, as I was just about to implement this.
From a strategic point of view, every improvement that helps to sort information from vast amounts of data is a good one. Tactically it would also make sense to provide everything needed for developers to enhance this feature.
Please check http://tweetranking.com, a Twitter directory based on personal recommendations on Twitter. The results are rankings of interesting people on Twitter and something like an aggregation of Twitter Lists. It is a german startup, but available in english language.
Theres probably gonna be a lot of new 3rd party twitter applications created for this, called something like ‘what-list-am-I-on.com’
How about an individual Twitter “Post” List?
this way you can send a tweet to a list of users that you may or may not follow, without having to RT every time you run out of characters in a single tweet.
like: baseball_buddies, news_pundits, or sewing_club friends
This reminds me of http://tweetknot.com
The LIST are WONDERFUL, lol. They are better than follow friday and all that messy tweeting… my growth rate was really high since i started using them. U can find good ones at Listorious.com in different categories or you can follow mine which is in the top 170 lists thus far at http://twitter....ocialnetworkers Once u start to follow the list we put you on the list to network with ones already listed. Thanks and great post here, see u again, Elucid !!!!