6 Ways To Look At Twitter Lists

Antonella Stellacci — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:33:52 +0000

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.

Tired Of Spam On Twitter? It Might Soon Get Worse.

Antonella Stellacci — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:52:31 +0000

Yesterday news broke that Twitter is in advanced talks with both Google and Microsoft to let them include Tweets in their search. The partnership could be a game-changer. The way search works today is still very 1.0 or top-down: the “importance” of a site is vastly determined by the authoritativeness and number of sites linking back to it (in meaningful ways). But, as pointed out by viral marketing scientist Dan Zarella, “Page to page links are too slow. And news can take days to get indexed. More and more news is breaking on Twitter, not Google, because it’s not real time”.

According to Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist at Amazon.com, in 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008.Information overload is a serious threat to the end-user and to search engines. By adding Twitter to the equation, Google and Bing can offer real-time and relevant filters (through your circle of followers) to make search a new and compelling experience again.

So that is good news. And it might be good news also for companies who are willing to engage their customers in relevant ways because the return might be a double-boost in traffic (from Twitter and from Google). As in the case of Moonfruit, a London based website builder, who run a sweepstakes last summer on Twitter, and saw not only a 300% spike in traffic and 20% in sales, but in less than a month climbed from the fourth to the first Google position for the key-phrase “free website builder”.

But not all is good, not yet. Credibility is still an unresolved issue for Twitter. Supposedly they are working on it, and this is not one of the millions rumors on what’s next for Twittter, it’s Evan Williams saying so. A reputation system is due, soon. But as with all rankings, people find ways to game them. If 90% of emails and 25% of SMS are spam. Twitter, as we know, is not immune at all from the spam plague and spammers have been infiltrating tweets, direct messages, @reply messages and follower lists.

How does spam get into Twitter? The techniques are many and ingenious.

Trending topics and #hastgas: To get messages in front of as many users as possible, tweet spam often includes the trending topic keywords of the day and popular #hashtags
Bait and Switch: since spammy pitches inside a tweet tend to be ignored,many spammers recur to the bait and switch tactic, where an embedded link goes to a site with content unrelated to the original tweet. Short URLs embedded in a tweet are used to obfuscate obvious links to spam, porn or malware sites.
Fake retweets: Retweets may replace the original text and are then associated with a trusted name. This might soon less frequent, as Project Retweets gets rolled-out.

What has Twitter done so far to fight spam?

Twitter does regular sweeps to kill thousands of spam accounts, but new ones are opened up just as quickly — and Twitter offers only limited tools to help users clean it up. Users can block follower and report spammers by sending a direct message with the account name to Twitter’s Spam Watch account. But the blocking mechanism is useless. People you’ve blocked can still read your timeline, retweet you, @reply you.

More safeguards need to be put in place though. Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand, has some spot-on recommendations:

“Accounts less than a day old don’t get to show up in Twitter Search and/or show up for trending topics
Figure a reputation score for accounts and only let those appear in for trending topics
Partner with a service for malware detection, so that any links Twitter puts out are analyzed to be safe”

Resolving the issue of spam and credibility is critical to Twitter future. Once Twitter is inside Google, the tipping point to become a worldwide phenomenon is at hand. But there’s also a scenario where it becomes a zombieland inhabited by link farmers and spammers.

Snowcrashing » Twitter

6 Ways To Look At Twitter Lists

Tired Of Spam On Twitter? It Might Soon Get Worse.