Sorting (courtesy flickr: CC BY-ND 2.0)

Last year Twitter introduced a new feature called ‘Lists’ that I think a few people are still not sure about.  To be honest – using lists on the twitter website is a bit wasted, the real value of lists is when you combine a dedicated twitter client with a mobile twitter client.

Keeping in Sync

For some time most of the dedicated twitter clients for your desktop computer have had the ability to organise tweets into columns.  One column for your main feed, another for your replies and mentions, another for your ‘favorite tweeters’ and another for ‘clients’ (as an example of course).  Similar functionality crept into mobile tools also, however the problem was that there was no way to synchronize your columns between your desktop client and your mobile client.  So in simple terms – if I added you to my favorites column in hootsuite, then I would have to do the same on tweetdeck on my iPhone.  Crud!

Twitter lists solve this problem.  If I add you to a specific column (or list) on my desktop then you are automatically added everywhere.  Next time I look at that list on my phone then I see your tweets there also.

Many Interests

If you’re anything like me you also have many different interests however want to stick to one twitter account.  Twitter lists also provide you the ability to organise and sort your twitter friends into different groups based on those interests.  As an example I have a twitter list called “Know in real life” which is a list that I add people to once I have actually met them. I have another list for people that talk about social media, and yet another for participants of my seminars.  This makes it easy for me to see tweets based on what I’m trying to achieve, if it’s work time then I’ll watch the social media list – if it’s weekend time I’ll watch the people I know in real life.

A New Number Game

For many people twitter is unfortunately about getting as many followers as possible, and I can’t help thinking that twitter lists may fall into the same category.  I’m expecting someone at some point to exclaim how many lists they are on on twitter and hope people are impressed.  Twitter makes it easy to see if a user is on a list (anyone’s list) and also allows you to see which lists a user is on.

List Subscriptions

The final element of lists on twitter is that as a twitter user you have the capacity to follow someone’s list, which is altogether different to following an individual twitter user.  When you choose to follow a list – you get to see tweets from everyone in that list (even people you may have blocked).  It also means that if the list creator adds and removes people from the list then that also affects the tweets you see.  This is good and bad – in that you may follow a list and start to like tweets from a few individuals on the list (good) but then the list owner may remove those users and you no longer see that valuable information (bad).

Finally… right now you can only create 20 lists – but 20 is plenty.