Introducing Twitter Lists

By Sarah Granger

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Twitter's popularity is soaring, but since it launched, users have been requesting extended features of various sorts. Some of the applications built on top of Twitter, like TweetDeck, built features like groups on top of Twitter, but that data wasn't transferrable to other versions of Twitter. Until now. Enter Twitter Lists.

Introduced over the past few weeks, Twitter Lists is a new capability gradually just released as a Beta feature. It allows users to group other Twitter users publicly or privately. It also allows them to follow other users' lists, and to put people on lists that they do not follow.

Getting Started

To access Twitter Lists, make sure to use a web browser to check your Twitter account and make sure the feature has been added. Once there, you'll see a big banner across the top of the screen that begins with "New! Lists." Below the description are two buttons. The one on the left is 'Create a New List.' After selecting that option, users can create a list name that should all be run together or hyphenated like a directory name, and then select whether that list will be public or private. Lists are easy to edit any time, so it's no problem to experiment a little.

Once the first list is created, pick a few users to follow on the list and then you can take a look at how to edit them. First, the Twitter interface will send you straight to a search box to look up people to add to your lists, but searches are limited, so it's easier to just go to a few people you already follow or know their Twitter IDs. There's a little Lists button next to the little wheel button to the top right of the user page. It's simple to select the lists and check off list boxes inside that pop-up window.

Building Lists

The easiest way to build and edit lists quickly is to create a bunch at once. Think about the community you follow and how you might like to organize the members into subsets, and start creating by topic. For @digitallanding, for example, we might create a news list and a tech list that we follow (like mine at http://twitter.com/sairy/tech), or a list of contributing writers. Or we could create a list just for an upcoming tech related event and delete it later. Lists can be built for short or long-term. The down side is that each user can only create 20 lists at a time.

Once multiple lists have been created, the fastest way to start filling them is to go through the list of people you follow, select the Lists button and check off the boxes that apply to whichever lists where you may wish to add that person. One caveat: sometimes if you move on to the next user to add to lists too quickly, that user may already look to have those items selected, but that's not the case - just leave the pop-up window, go back and it'll be set properly. Another thing to note: sometimes users will say in their profile that they're one thing: a baseball player, for example, yet you'll find all they've been tweeting about is knitting. Watching your own list feeds to see how the chatter trail is going helps make sure the lists are optimally configured. Sometimes it's better to take it slowly with regard to list additions.

Future Fun

While Lists aren't available for mobile Twitter products yet, they will be soon -- with some limited functionality (but you can expect that to increase). And, of course, people are already building lists of lists. Take for example the Top Twitter Lists list. For bloggers, there's even a Twitter Lists widget

If your account is ever improperly categorized on a list, you can block yourself with the blocking feature.

Although it can take time to configure, it's worth it for regular Twitter users to take advantage of the new Lists tool.