Twitter's Got Lists

If you've been on Twitter the last few days, you may have noticed something a bit different on the top of your front page. Twitter launched its "Lists" functionality (currently in beta), with a welcome note to all its loyal followers. As the message states, lists are "[a] great way to organize the people you follow and discover new and interesting accounts."

Since I currently follow more than 500 people, I've definitely noticed how difficult it is to keep up with the people on my main list, so I can see the advantage of putting together smaller lists. For instance, if you want to be able to separate out what your favorite celebrities such as Shaquille O'Neal, Ashton Kutcher or Martha Stewart are tweeting about, you simply put them together in one list and have easy access to their celebtastic tweets. And as mentioned in this Computerworld article, "Lists can be either private or public, which allows others to view your list and even subscribe to those tweets without having to subscribe to the individual users."

As the article also mentions, the actual process of putting together lists can take a while, depending, of course, on how many people you follow and how many lists you want to create. That's because you have to scroll through your entire list of the people you're following, search for people or simply add people from their individual Twitter page. Of course, for those of who you are truly addicted to Twitter and have thousands of people you're following, what's another few hours, right?

Image courtesy of Pasquale D’Silva, via Wikimedia Commons