In addition to geolocation, Twitter’s about to launch their new lists feature, which lets you organize the people you follow into lists and see what lists others have included you on.
For example, I can create a list called “Lifehacker editors” or “Co-workers” or “NYC pals” or “Sci-Fi experts”, and view tweets just from those people in a list view. I’ve been making lists of people I follow using TweetDeck for some time now. However, having this baked into the Twitter web site and API makes it more convenient and easy to share. Here are some screenshots of how it works from the beta.
Click on “Create a new list” to name your list and set it to public (anyone can see) or private (only you can see it). Here I’m making a Twitter list of folks I follow from the popular web series, The Guild.
Then, add people you follow to your lists from your Following page, or from his/her individual Twitter page.
After I added a bunch of Guildies to my list, I can see just tweets from them.
The lists feature also includes a little ego-surfing information, too. I can see how many lists I’ve been included on, and I can also see what public lists any other user’s on. Here’s @wilw’s right now–surely his list of lists will blow up once lists get released.
In essence, lists puts Twitter’s controversial “suggested users” into the hands of the users. As I said on Twitter, lists is a much-needed upgrade to “Follow Friday” recommendations, and a handy organizing tool for anyone who follows more than a few people on Twitter. (Thanks to the Twitter folks for giving me a sneak peek at the Lists beta.)
5 Comments
Miguel Wickert- Pineiro
Gina,
I like it! I’m simply impressed with Twitter. I think this is an excellent move. This seems to make life easier for the rest of us! 🙂 Bravo to you for sharing and gaining access and to Twitter for their continual development.
-Mig
emailtoid.net/i/7ab13bf6/…
I’m pretty excited for this. TweetDeck has yet to win me over, since the simplicity of the web interface is usually preferable to too many options. Thanks for sharing with us 🙂
Joost Schuur
Your screen shots don’t describe a way to use lists as ‘groups’ to simply filter people you follow and prioritize which updates you want to track, much like Facebook lists work.
Is that supported in Twitter’s list implementation or is the focus on discoverability?
Holger
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 englisch language.
mike
http://mixtweet.com is a Twitter List service already available. It allows you to do everything described above. In addition you don’t need to follow someone to add them to a list, you get real-time updates and you can share your list via embeddable widgets.
More info: http://mixtweet.posterous.com/announcing-mixtweet