Twitter has rolled out its new Lists feature to a larger portion of its user base right now. The feature allows you to group users you follow together and then lets you share those for others to also follow.
Setting up a list is simple. Currently, the homepage features a Lists banner that allows you to start simply by clicking on the “Create a new list” button. Once you do this, an overlay appears and you just type in the list name (which Twitter then converts into a permalink along the lines of twitter.com/USERNAME/LISTNAME), and set the list to be public or private. This is obviously an important distinction as the public one, others will be able to see, while the private one will be for your eyes only.
On the right hand column of you Twitter.com homepage, you will see a new “lists” area under you bio. Clicking on this will take you to your list overview page where you can manage your own lists, as well as see other user’s public lists that you are a part of. Also, on user profile pages you will see that the users’ lists are now listed under the “Favorites” area in the right hand toolbar.
Clicking on any of these lists will take you to a stream of just the users followed by that list. Basically, this is a filter, if used the right way. This is something Twitter proper has long needed (though plenty of third party services like Brizzly have stepped in to offer it).
Unfortunately, adding people to your list is not as easy as it should be. The reason for this is that there is no user search functionality. Instead, you have to either go to your “following” page, or to that person’s profile to manually add them.
A number of third-party sites and services were granted early access to the Lists feature, and have been working with its API to integrate the functionality into their services.
Much has been made about Twitter’s Suggest User List (Disclosure: We’re on it) and how it wasn’t a fair method of user discovery. These lists will undoubtedly help alleviate a lot of that strain.
Update: Initially, I suggested this was a massive roll out, it is not. As project lead Nick Kallen says, it seems that just a lot of people I happen to know were added. My bad, sorry to excite everyone. The feature is very cool though.
Update 2: We’ve made a TechCrunch Team List if you want to follow that — which you should.
Update 3: Twitter also has a team list, which is following 108 people. That would seem to suggest that they may be over 100 employees already, which is more than they’ve stated recently. Actually, strike that, that list include non-employee contractors, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has just informed us.
Just what I’ve been waiting for.
So true +1
follow my /friends list
they politly asked you to not talk about it lol
i still can’t see that feature :/
Thanks for flagging. We’re very excited about these capabilities and will be rolling them into CloudProfile within a couple of weeks. Should be a tremendous organizing tool in terms of helping users to both better organize their stream as well as to help with the discovery of other people and groups that they should be engaged with.
I guess I just got to keep refreshing.
No lists feature for me, yet.
Awesome, can’t wait to try it out! How will this affect seesmic tweetdeck and the like?
I want to see how third-party apps use it.
You know, this is nice, but it would be much nicer if they’d fix the username/password/email situation that’s been killing so many of us for the past few days/week.
Was there a site which TechCrunch recently covered doing the same thing? Bad day for them.
@rael As some of you may have noticed, we just released our beta Lists feature to a skosh more people.
Skosh = small amount. Not huge portion…
tips coming in suggest otherwise, but fair enough, i’ll update that wording.
Hey MG, http://TweepML.org is already supporting a simple import of Twitter Lists.
You can go to TweepML.org and click to create a new list and enter your Twitter List for us to find all people there, like on this list:
http://twitter....lemon/test-list
There is more to come.
-Marcelo
TweepML does this great.
about time! there’s gonna be soooo many cool ways to sort data, i’m excited like a dumb little tech geek
I am pleased to read it! This will save us a lot of time, even if Tweetdeck already helped me a lot in organizing my lists.
This add-on is a must…
UI is hard to use. I want to be able to select a bunch of people at once and put them in a list. Drag-n-drop would be nice too.
Individual checkmarks works when the # is small. No so good when there are lots of people to sort.
OMG! Since when is adding a simple feature “breaking” news?
Now please make haste with Project Retweet, Twitter.
Amen to that!
Finally, just what the doctor ordered. Now I can have my twitter stream on at work for just my geek/coworker list so I don’t get distracted with politics, news, etc.
Thanks.
You’re jumping the gun a bit. I can’t access Lists from any of my 6 accounts I have access to, and the TechCrunch tweet “follow the team” you just sent out resolves to a blank page (I’m assuming this is due to not having lists enabled for my account yet.
Tweetdeck does something similar with its columns. I don’t see it yet on the Twitter site…probably a staggered roll out.
I’ve got them. Still buggy though – all of my lists show up as having 0 members, but when I view the actual list pages, I can see all the people.
I’M GOING TO TWEET THIS!!! ZOMG!!!!
Are the lists public? Because I want to sort my Twitter feed into lists like “Social media fellatio” and “Journalists who hate journalism” but you know, some of these folks might get offended over being on such lists.
They’re public or private, your choice.
wahoo! been waiting for this for a long time!
Here is some more commentary: http://blogs.zd...weblife/?p=1055
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”, but apps such as Brizzly will convert your groups to lists when they become public. For all those who don’t have acces to Twitter’s lists, check out Brizzly. Now Twitter, let’s take a look at that ReTweet API we’ve all been waiting for!
Of course, lists have way more features than groups. (in Twitterrific, Brizzly, ect.)
So, do private lists basically take out Yammer?
is there anywhere to sign up to try and get on the rollout of the twitter lists?
I got added to the beta. Enjoy the functionality. The lists you follow & create are separate from your main timeline, user profiles show you how many lists they’re added to, lists you make don’t have to be made up of solely people you’re following (or are following you).
That said, list making can easily be seen as a time consuming process you’d rather not do (especially when you 1st make your lists).
Though I find it will work better to help clean up your twitter experience, you can set up lists for the friends who tweet often and tweets are largely “noise” (like myself), or people who tend to tweet less frequently but useful/resourceful material to read.
It’s a step in the right direction, but as you say, it’s clunky when it comes to adding people to our lists. It needs an entry field with autocomplete.
Cannot wait to try it. It seems everyone on my friends lists got beta but not me. haha. Sucks. But I’m usually always the last one to get invited, but the one that makes the impact.
Twitter is down for me. The site and new tweetdeck doesn’t connect :/
Do I need lists enabled to view others’ lists, or am I missing something?
It seems that if you cannot create lists, then you cannot view any lists.
For folks who don’t yet have access to Twitter Lists or are just curious about existing apps, check out http://tweeppacks.com .
Similarly, curated lists, but with a helping of discovery via search, tags, and ’subscribers’. Also, we have a unique subscription model that tracks changes on “packs” you are subscribed to and allows you to “update” with a click. “Subscribers” ends up being a cool way to see the consumption of your (or any) pack.
-Nipun
All the idiots who created list “products” on top of the tweeter platform can now die. Good stuff really!
I think it may, or may not, be of interest to small-time twitterers such as me: I haven’t enough followers to organize into a list, and as for following a list, I think it would fill my wall to illegibility with frequency of posts.
If my understanding is correct, this new List feature is only for organizing people You FOLLOW and not for organizing your FOLLOWERS.
I think good things to add because it will be lagging far behind compared to facebook or google talk when it launches wave
Some limitations I’ve already hit:
1. You can’t have more than 500 people on a list.
2. You can’t have more than 20 lists on any one Twitter account (this will get people to sign up for more Twitter accounts).
I’ve already made a list of my favorite 500 Twitterers at http://twitter....favstar-fm-list
I find it add that I have to add myself to a list I have created instead of being able to selectively post statuses to that list
Is it not just useless making a new twitter account for more lists?
@Scoble Thanks for your added first-hand input. Looking fwd to filtering the stream.
Enabling this for only some users on Twitter was a very interesting move.
Usually, beta programs are for brand new, self contained sites. So when you get invited, your on a platform where your only interacting with fellow beta users.
However, Twitter already has millions of users. Giving new features to only some users in their situations causes a lot of confusion.
All these people on Twitter are tweeting about their new lists and I can’t see them. Neither can majority of the Twitter users.
Just thought I’d point that out.
My University of Miami list
http://twitter....ialJulio/umiami
but can users that are not part of the beta get to them, even if they are “public” lists?
Lists can replace FollowFriday and serve as tags. We at MustExist are developing features that will make creating, viewing and sharing Twitter Lists more fun: http://www.must...m/twitter_lists
How about, next time, get the facts, take some time to assemble the news into an accurate and correct article, and
How about, next time, get the facts, take some time to assemble the news into an accurate and correct article, and THEN publish it?
I’m in your Lists, acting all popular…
At first I did not get it but after (paying attention) seeing the TC list, I got the concept…
This shows that Twitter are clever because I can’t recall anyone from the developer community thinking of this, totally new idea, totally super relevant to the Twitter service.
I believe in this company that they will continue to build innovation.
You’re no good at keeping something secret!
This is a great new feature it will cut down on spam and you can utilize your list to important people you would like to follow.
I’m not totally convinced of the usefulness this will supply. I’m just now getting the hang of what I’m using. Guess Twitter has to keep technocreating “stuff” to keep up with the rest.
I never understood why Twitter did not offer this feature from the beginning
Any idea when the Lists feature will be generally available ?