Friday, October 16, 2009

Making my list, checking it twice…

As I am sure many of you have noticed, Twitter introduced the new list functionality yesterday. It is still in beta, so not everyone has been able to see it. When you log in, you will see this screen for the first time.

FireShot capture #003 - 'Breaking_ Twitter Begins Lists Rollout' - www_techcrunch_com_2009_10_15_breaking-twitter-begins-lists-rollout

Lists work as advertised, you can:

  1. Create a list from your followers.
  2. Make it public or private.

    FireShot capture #001 - 'Twitter _ Home' - twitter_com_#


  3. Your public lists can be followed by others.

 FireShot capture #002 - 'Twitter _ Lists' - twitter_com_warrenss_lists_memberships

On your Twitter page, the number of lists that you are on will be displayed next to your follower number and your public lists will be shown further down the page.

FireShot capture #004 - 'Josh Weinberger (kitson) on Twitter' - twitter_com_kitson

When you click on one of your lists, you only see tweets from the members of that list.  Sounds like Tweetdeck, right?

So what other functionality would I like to see in lists?

  1. Creating lists from your followers page is pretty slow going, especially if you have many followers. You can also go to someone’s page directly, but that is not much more efficient.
  2. It would be great to be able to send a tweet to all list members, sort of like L + name of the list. This would work just like Mike Langford’s great product, Tweetworks.

One thing that I will be curious to see: Once Twitter Lists becomes popular, will more people flock to using Twitter on the web instead of the clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic? 

What are your impressions of Lists?  How are you using them?  What other features do you need for it to be really useful? Do you think you will migrate from Tweetdeck?