A First Look At Twitter Lists

I am an early adopter, usually, but I was late to the party on Twitter lists. And then, once I gained access to the new feature the value it offered seemed so oblique — since I had not been using lists in a Twitter client, formerly — that I didn’t immediately grasp how lists would fit into my use of Twitter.

First off, lists appear under each user’s account (or will) as a list in the right hand margin

 

And they can be passed around in tweets as a sort of URL-ish extension, like this:

@stoweboyd/some-list-name

Adding names to lists is very annoying, since there is no shell script like way to direct Twitter to add someone to a list, analogous to ‘follow @username’. You must travel to that user’s page, select the list button next to their name, and then select which of your lists to add the user to. Here you see that I have added @mashable to my tech-news list.

 

The initial thought that I had, and which I think most others have, is that I would create a great bunch of lists and aggregate all of my contacts into them. However, just the time involved made this daunting, so I held off, just experimenting a bit. And then I thought, I don’t think lists should be used like tags, as a means to indicate some topical association with other users. There has to be some functional benefit or else it is all window dressing.

What I have started to do, in that line of thought, is to use lists to lump together all the accounts that I have been following that aren’t really people, like companies, media outlets, food trucks and the like, and then I stop following those accounts. 

The reality is that I don’t necessarily