The bril­liance of Twit­ter lists and sug­ges­tions for mak­ing them more powerful

In my opin­ion Twit­ter is the best tool we have today to engage with oth­ers, spread a mes­sage, net­work, meet other like­minded peo­ple, and stay on top of the news, in any indus­try. The only aspect I’ve always found prob­lem­atic on Twit­ter was the impos­si­bil­ity of orga­niz­ing infor­ma­tion. This is some­thing that’s changed now with the new Twit­ter lists, which allow you to orga­nize peo­ple in any sort of list you like.

So how have you been using lists? What sort of names have you been giv­ing your lists? It’s quite inter­est­ing to see what lists peo­ple have put you under and how you have been “cat­e­go­rized.”  With Twit­ter lists, I can put peo­ple I am fol­low­ing into spe­cific cat­e­gories. So for exam­ple, I have cre­ated lists of “blog­gers,” “social media,” “brands,” etc.

Twit­ter lists are going to change the way we net­work and socialize. No longer are we going to have a list of jour­nal­ists’ emails to send a press release to but rather we’ll have a Twit­ter list of all these jour­nal­ists with their Twit­ter han­dles. Patrick Kitano writes in his post titled Twit­ter Lists will Orga­nize the social graph: “It takes an indi­vid­ual an hour to build a 200-person Twit­ter List in com­par­i­son to the days / weeks it takes to attain a 200-fan FB page. This will make Twit­ter Lists the pro­lific stan­dard for orga­niz­ing the social graph.”

Each of us is orga­niz­ing his/her own “fol­low­ing,” or rather social graph — basi­cally  help­ing twit­ter orga­nize its data­base for them. These lists will become invalu­able to us both pro­fes­sion­ally and socially. How­ever, please note that one Twit­ter account can cre­ate only 20 lists and each list can only con­tain 500 mem­bers, so choose your lists care­fully and who’s in them even more care­fully. Robert Scoble wrote  an excel­lent post describ­ing the lim­i­ta­tions, bugs, impact and bril­liance of Twit­ter lists.

The fea­ture itself, I think, is rev­o­lu­tion­ary. The inter­face and usabil­ity? Well, not as great. So here is my top 10 list of sug­ges­tions for improv­ing twit­ter lists:

10) Include a “Fea­tured Lists” sec­tion each day/week for each mem­ber, based on the user’s interests/preferences

9) Abil­ity to invite peo­ple to a pri­vate list

8 ) Abil­ity to com­bine lists

7) Abil­ity to search within spe­cific lists

6) “Abil­ity to build lists by search across following/followers and auto­matic list cre­ation. For exam­ple, I could build an instant list of Berke­ley real estate agents by search­ing “Berke­ley real estate” across my fol­low­ing, and click­ing a pre­sumed but­ton called “Auto­matic List” (credit: Patrick Kitano)

5) Allow spe­cial fea­tures for lists. For exam­ple: Being able to send a mes­sage to all the mem­bers of a par­tic­u­lar list

4) Allow the abil­ity to decide which lists will dis­play on your sidebar

3) Allow to eas­ily search for peo­ple while adding them to lists

2) Abil­ity to add more than 20 lists (per­haps a pre­mium feature?)

1) Abil­ity to add more than 500 mem­bers to a list (another pre­mium feature?)

As Scoble writes, what will be the impact of this bril­liant fea­ture? “You’ll fol­low a lot more peo­ple. Why? Because you’ll find some­one who has done a really great list, say, of pro­gram­mers, and you’ll add the whole list. I’ve already done this a LOT and found that Twit­ter has got­ten way more inter­est­ing because of it.”  

Barak Hachamov, founder of My6Sense, a startup that learns users’ behav­ior over time and pri­or­i­tizes their infor­ma­tion streams for them, tells me: This fea­ture is so sim­ple and yet has the poten­tial to have such a huge impact on how peo­ple con­sume and dis­cover real-time information.

I tweeted this week: “It’s no longer about how many fol­low­ers you have. Now its about how many Twit­ter lists you’re on.” And I stand behind what I said. It doesn’t mat­ter any­more if 100,000 peo­ple are fol­low­ing you if you’re not on any one’s list. Lind­sayT tweeted me say­ing: “Why does this mat­ter? why isn’t the question-how many friends you inter­act with through this social medium? qual­ity over quan­tity.” So I answer Lind­sayT in the most per­sonal of ways: The more lists you’re on, the more you inter­act with oth­ers. Peo­ple put you on a list because you specif­i­cally inter­act and made your­self a name in that par­tic­u­lar cat­e­gory.  Twit­ter lists are the new mea­sure­ment these days. Twit­ter lists are awe­some. We will soon enough ask our­selves how we ever lived with­out them.Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a con­sul­tancy spe­cial­iz­ing in help­ing brands use social media tools such as social net­works, the blo­gos­phere and social soft­ware to cre­ate brand aware­ness, recruit employ­ees or achieve any other goal. See her busi­ness pro­file, con­tact Ayelet, fol­low her on Twit­ter or leave a com­ment below.

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