The Twitter Lists feature launched for everyone today. Here’s Twitter’s announcement and a thorough tutorial from CNET.
I’ve had the beta version for a week, and although it’s obvious that this feature is going to create a new class of social media whoring (list-whoring), I also find it incredibly useful.
#1 Back to basics
I fell in love with Twitter when it had less than 100 users because it was an easy way to keep in touch with my girlfriend and my little sister. Then Twitter got too big and I started missing tweets from those people. So now I have a list for just family–and I never miss their posts. Lists let you filter the firehouse.
#2 Rediscovery
The folks at Twitter are hoping the lists feature helps with account discovery. It does. But what I’ve found is that it also helps with re-discovery–accounts that I forgot I was following start popping up again when I go to look at one of my lists.
#3 Retweeting
@SarahM says that corporate accounts should aim to talk about themselves 10% of the time and about other people 90% of the time. So for my @crowdvine account I’m always looking for material. I have a whole section in my Google Reader devoted to this. Now I have two Twitter lists that are perfect for retweetable material, @crowdvine/eventstars for event news and @crowdvine/tech-stars for tech and social software news.
#4 Research
I created a bunch of lists related to research that I’m doing. I want to know about events so I started with that list (@crowdvine/greatevents) but I also want to know about different event sements, so I made my own for barcamps (@crowdvine/barcamps) and then discovered other great event lists like @konigi/uxevents and @underflow_/ruby-events.
#5 Want-to-meet
I often run across people on CrowdVine that I think I should meet or email or follow up with in some fashion. Now I can bookmark them and get back to them later. I have this list private right now, but I think it would actually be a light weight way to meet people if it were public. What would you do if you found your name on somebody a list called want-to-meet?
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