If you follow what’s new with Twitter, you’re certainly aware of their latest and most significant announcement in some time: lists. It’s safe to say that the new feature has already been a huge hit and is one of the most requested features (along with integrated retweeting). Via 3rd party tools such as TweetDeck and Seesmic, you’ve been able to create groups and break out those you follow. This was a great way to solve the common issue of too much noise in your Twitter stream, especially when following a large number of people. I also used this for categorizing.
Thankfully for us tweeters, this functionality is now integrated into twitter.com and in my opinion, Twitter hit the ball out of the park, as the implementation is extremely well done.
When you create a list, you’re able to add people you’re following and edit out those you’re not. Following/follower status is irrelevant. Anytime you are on anyone’s profile page, you have the ability to add them to a list. The result is your created list(s) contain the Twitter streams of those who have been added to the list. Simple enough, right?
Examples of lists in action are the six lists (as of this writing) Techcrunch has created: @TechCrunch/microsoft. It looks like they’ve collected all of Microsoft’s official Twitter entities, along with a few other Microsoft-related accounts. The cool thing is that this list will be accessible from my profile page, hence anyone who visits my page can see that I follow it. I love that the ability to follow lists exists without having to individually follow each member of a list (Hope I didn’t lose you there). The Twitter users in the Microsoft list will not show up in my timeline.
Since lists act like their own person and are accessible to anyone, I imagine there will soon be a directory ranking of the most popular Twitter lists (Kevin Rose of WeFollow just announced WeFollow’s lists of top influential users. No rankings of lists just yet). This assumes the list is not private as Twitter offers the option of making lists private, too.
The most creative example I’ve seen so far (I have to admit I’m a tad biased here, is what the NHL has done. They’re using lists as a method to categorize NHL fans by favorite team. They’re methodology is simple: ask users to send an @message to them including their favorite team and the hashtag #myfavoriteNHLteam. Presto, like-minded fans join their team’s “official Twitter fan club”.
Here at EMG, we’ve brainstormed how lists can be used in higher education. There’s real opportunity to get in on this Twitter feature. Let’s say we use an NHL-like approach. Your institution can assemble current and prospective students by academic interest/major. By tweeting, “Please tweet @XYZuniversity your desired/current major and include the hashtag #mymajor,” you create a public forum for students interested in their major.
Another possibility is to create lists for alumni by graduating class. Or you might organize your faculties by college, providing students the ability to gain insights from every professor in their area of study. You could run contests and as prospective or current students achieve a challenge set out by your institution, they are added to a list. The idea of creating a “prestigious” list in which you had to earn your way on to sounds kind of nifty to me.
To wrap up this post, it’s important to follow pertinent lists yourself. Lists are still in their infancy, but well-populated lists are popping up fast, and of course doing more following will increase your chances of both your account or your lists being followed. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gong to see if an EMG developer can help me create a site that categorizes and ranks Twitter lists!
All kidding aside, is there one out there currently? If so, please let me know in the comments!
