6 Ways To Look At Twitter Lists

Posted on 01. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Trends

This week, Twitter made its new Lists feature broadly available. Lists allow you to enumerate a collection of Twitter accounts, and then easily read updates from just those accounts. Others can view your lists, and choose to follow them as well. Here are 6 ways to look at the future implications of the Lists.

A Reputation Tool

Lists can be used to assess one own’s expertise in a field. As Twitter expands and lists survive the first hang-over of UberGeeks and SocialMediaMavens, expect human-curated lists to go deeper and local. Owning a niche is going to put the curator in the spotlight, much more than a simple followers/”featured on X lists” count.
Lists will measure “influence”. The math is not going to be a simple addition. Being on 1,000 Twitter lists won’t matter, if no one follows them and/or if they aggregate mildly irrelevant Tweets and are followed by equally unimportant users. Reputation for Twitter lists is yet undisclosed, but most likely it will follow the “PageRank” principles and factor in the authority of the list curator, how many followers the list has and the combined reputation of the list members (@mentions, ReTweets, followers) and its followers.

A People Discovery Tool

Affinity: with lists, people are now being tagged and so is their content. Searching through lists can help you find more relevant persons in your topic of interest. With lists you can find people well beyond your six pixels of separation, in a more structured and effective way and with no less serendipity.
Death of the SUL: Presumably soon, the “Find People” feature on Twitter will change to including list searches, and maybe replace the infamous Suggested User List with Top Lists by category.
Decline of Hashtags: Events and TweetUps will most likely make use of lists instead of hashtags which are often hard to memorize and promote.

A Content Aggregation Tool

Lists aggregate content from all types of sources and it is now easier to aggregate it by topic and keep yourself abreast of all the relevant news.
A replacement for RSS? Robert Scoble is betting on Twitter lists against Google Reader, i.e. RSS. Although I favor RSS as a content fruition tool, RSS has some clear disadvantages in terms of mass-market penetration and “social” features. To discover new content via RSS, you can use real-time engines as Feedly, but it is still an impersonal experience. As Social Search and especially Facebook prove, sharing and discovering content through trusted sources can be a lot more pervasive and effective.

A Corporate Identity Tool

Pros: The long-coveted ability to aggregate in a list all your company’s accounts.
Cons: The risk of finding your brand associated with undesirable content becomes much more real. So expect tighter policies from companies with regards to what can be tweeted. Another fall-back of the list feature for companies is that people might stumble much more easily on their competitors. Say I’m looking for “free Mp3s”, I might get into a list that aggregates Rhapsody, Amazon and Lala. The battle for attention becomes fiercer.

A Mob Power Tool

People feel protected by the idea of belonging to a tribe. As happened on Facebook, expect users to leverage of the power of the mob to voice their likes and dislikes, their consensus or dissension, such as “I hate Twitter Retweet”, or “I love VirginAmerica” and so on. So far politeness has prevailed. But we’re less than a week into mass-market lists. Expect lists and Twitter to become more “political”.

A Crowd-Sourced Targeting Tool

As Twitter steps into search and advertising, expect lists to be used in combination with its geo-location API to offer a more accurate targeting to its corporate users and/or advertisers. While you create lists, think how much you’re increasing Twitter CPM.

In terms of user experience, lists are a blessing. Now you can follow a topic or group of interesting people, without following each of them. Twitter Web UI got a big boost in usability with this new feature. And for sure lists will help Twitter growth as a site, in both terms of traffic and engagement. What to wish?

-Improvements to make Twitter lists more open, so that more than one owner can be set, as in a group and suggestions for new members can be made.

-Spammers and affiliate marketers to be banned as soon as possible.

-The ability to offer signups to lists outside of Twitter. If we’re contributing to making Twitter a better place, expertise should be rewarded.

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8 Responses to “6 Ways To Look At Twitter Lists”

Tweets that mention 6 Ways To Look At Twitter Lists | Snowcrashing -- Topsy.com

01. Nov, 2009

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Valdis Krebs and Antonella Stellacci, Jim Parsons. Jim Parsons said: "6 Ways To Look At Twitter Lists" http://bit.ly/38nUwW [...]

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uberVU - social comments

01. Nov, 2009

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by _Antonella_: New Blog Post- 6 Ways To Look At Twitter Lists http://bit.ly/5mDSn #twitterlists…

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erdina

01. Nov, 2009

I’d think having the ability to block yourself from being included in a list–without blocking the list’s maintainer–is important.

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- Antonella Stellacci
  
  01. Nov, 2009
  
  Yes, this should be a priority in the fight vs spam!
  
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Twitter Lists: What Are They And How To Use Them

02. Nov, 2009

[...] following article at the Snowcrashing blog discusses 6 Ways To Look At Twitter Lists [...]

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Twitter Lists Made Beautifully Simple - Make Money Online with Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach

03. Nov, 2009

[...] 6 Ways To Look At Twitter Lists [...]

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Jason Markow

03. Nov, 2009

Great Post. I love the idea of multiple owners for a list. I also agree with erdina that the ability to block or remove yourself from a list would be beneficial.

I think another hopeful addition would be to see “related lists” by subject not author.

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This Week in Twitter for 11/13/2009 « Church Mojo

16. Nov, 2009

[...] 6 Ways to Look at Twitter Lists Antonella Stellacci of Snowcrashing.com categorizes the major ways you can put Twitter lists to use. [...]

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