Twitter Lists, a new feature that lets users lump Twitter contacts into various groups, went live as a beta for more users this week and should be available to everyone soon.
The Lists feature was opened to eWEEK Oct. 29, so here's how to create a list. Lists is a fine feature to add for now, but it will be interesting to see what sort of negative fallout there might be from this. Lists could cramp the serendipity factor on Twitter. Users may elect to spend their whole time in Lists rather than venturing out to follow and meet new contacts on Twitter. Is Twitter going the route of Facebook?Twitter Lists, a new feature that lets users lump Twitter
contacts into various groups, went live as a beta to more users this week and
should be available to everyone soon.
It's fairly self-explanatory to seasoned Web services users, but Twitter
doesn't explicitly provide step-by-step instructions on how to create and
manage lists on its Website. Since the Lists feature was opened to eWEEK Oct.
29, here's a quick lesson on how to create a list.
Sign in to Twitter and if you see this message when you go to your Twitter homepage, you're ready
to rock: "New! Lists. A great way to organize the people you follow and
discover new and interesting accounts. (BETA)"
Click the "create a list" button and type in the name of a list
you want to use to group friends, colleagues, family and so on. Select whether
to make the list public for any Twitter user to read, or private to create your
own little walled garden of contacts.
Twitter will then ask you to type in the names of people you want to add,
but it's much easier to add people from your Following page or their profile
pages. Click on someone's profile, click the Lists drop-down menu, then check
the box of the list you want to lump a user in. Done!
Want to see where you're listed publicly? Go to your profile page and you'll
see a section for lists in your following/followers timeline. It's called,
surprise, "Listed."
Click on it to see who has listed you. Note that no one can monkey with
lists you've personally created under your account name. You may also edit and
delete your lists at any time.
Search Engine
Land provides the step-by-step
picture lesson here.
This feature rolled out to 25 percent of Twitter users Oct. 28, but
is now popping up for more of the almost 60 million Twitter users, according to
Twitter Lists technical lead Nick Kallen.
What's good about Lists? TechCrunch noted that "once somebody makes a good
list, other people can follow that entire list, which makes it much easier to
get started on Twitter."
True, and Lists is a fine fix to solve that problem, but it will be interesting
to see what sort of negative fallout there might be from this. Will friends
begin to exclude friends, throwing up boundaries in Twitter where previously
there were virtually none?
Lists could also cramp the serendipity factor on Twitter. Users may elect to
spend their whole time in Lists rather than venturing out to follow and meet
new contacts on Twitter. Is Twitter going the route of Facebook?
It's hard to say. In the meantime, let's list away.
Web Services, Web 2.0 & SOA 
