Check It Twice: Twitter Lists Now Open To All Users

Screen shot 2009-10-30 at 12.48.30 PMThe wait is over. Twitter’s new Lists feature is now available to all users, project lead Nick Kallen has just confirmed through a tweet. The functionality has been in testing for weeks now with a select group of users, and a couple of weeks ago, opened to a wider audience. As recently as yesterday, only 50% of Twitter had access to Lists, but after an unrelated bug forced Twitter to briefly remove the feature, they were able to roll it out to everyone else quickly.

This means that not only can all users now finally make their own lists, but perhaps more importantly, you can now see which lists you have been included on. The latter is quickly becoming a new metric for measuring popularity on the service (which users seem divided about if that’s a good or bad thing).

And everyone will now have access to the third party sites already starting to pop up around the Lists API, such as Listorious, a Lists directory.

So, now that everyone can see them, be sure to check out our TechCrunch team list. Later today, we’ll also share some other interesting lists that we’ve been working on.

Update: As a side note, List descriptions should be coming in the next week or so, Twitter’s Vitor Lourenco confirms. This will definitely help users tell what the list is supposed to be, rather than simply relying on the list name.