This is a quick prediction, but I think that the introduction of lists will change twitter dramatically allowing people to stop following any and all accounts they want to keep up with in favor of adding those accounts to a specific list. This will help make following counts a less important metric to watch for a lot of people. Once it’s understood that you don’t have to be following someone to add them to a list people will begin to adjust who they are following to those they actually know and interact with moving news and site feeds, or celebs and joke accounts over to lists.
This is a good thing.
I’ve long said the value of Twitter lies in creating more interaction with your peers, when your stream is filled with updates from your close circle of friends Twitter truly does become a social sixth sense. This gets muddied when your stream starts filling up with automated posts from sites you read, tweets from people you think are interesting but don’t actually know.
Two examples – I’m currently on just under 100 lists. A lot of those lists are created by people I don’t know and titled things like “tech” “internet” or “web” suggesting they follow me because of my relation to the web and that what I tweet about often relates to those topics. For any of those people who wanted to keep up with what I was saying, previously they would have had to follow me. That increased my follower count, but also put my tweets in their main stream. This means they might not see a tweet from a friend they regularly hang out with because I went on some rant about coffee. Now, they can stop following me but keep me on their tech list which allows them to stay better on top of their actual friends tweets, but also anytime they want to see what I or others are talking about in the web world they can just check the list they made and voila!
I’ve been saying that “follower count” is a stupid thing to track because it doesn’t really say anything about how many people are reading your updates.
The other example is that I follow a lot of people I know in cities other than the one I’m in. I follow them because we’re friends, but also because when I am in their cities they are who I usually interact with. The problem with that, is often these people spend a lot of time talking about things going on in their cities which if I’m not there are not useful to me and just fill up my stream with info I don’t need. I don’t want to stop following them for fear I’d forget their username when I did travel back there, but now thanks to lists I can create a New York list, a San Francisco list, a Berlin list, a Tokyo list, a Singapore list, etc and then I no longer need to follow those people in my main stream as anytime I need to know what is up in that corner of the world I have a list all set to go.
So my prediction is as people get more of a grasp on lists, they will stop following celebs they never actually speak with in favor of adding them to a list of celebs, they will stop following CNN and BBC news feeds in favor of creating a news list, they will stop following bands they like listening to in favor of a music list. This will make their main feeds more personal and a lot of the people who have joined Twitter in the last 24 months will see a whole other value to the service, one that many people who have been on much longer used to rave about which caused more people to join and actually ended up hurting.
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Agreed. Just need the Twitter Clients like Tweet Deck and Tweetie to catch up so I can use lists as I rarely use the Web.
Also would be useful to have a Twitter Lists Directory so I don’t have to go through the hassle of recreating common lists like “Major News Organizations” or “Los Angeles Taco Trucks.”
Oh yeah definitely, I think as the feature is rolled out to everyone all the clients will be racing to be the first ones to incorporate it and I suspect there will be new sites popping up that are list search directories a lot like summize was before Twitter bought it and turned it into Twitter Search.
None of this will happen over night, but as people start using it more and more I think that’s the direction it will go.
1. I consider lists a very poor substitute for our lost control of “@’s” ( the reason they were built )
2. All of Sean’s points about the value of lists may be washed away as soon as the rumored “super re-tweets” is released.
Took “@’s” away, gave us “lists” we didn’t ask for , then negate their value by giving us all the means to create infinite echo chambers with “Super RTs”.
*head explodes*
@Sean
Seesmic released an update today that incorporates lists, and Tweetdeck says theirs is due shortly.
Hopefully very soon Twitter apps will begin implementing list views, rather than just managing lists. So as you say, the primary feed shows those you follow, and perhaps the option to include other lists, but you should be able to jump between viewing other lists at any time as a way to separate out topics and themes. I might want to move news twitters out my main feed, but that doesn’t mean I want to stop seeing the tweets regularly.
Perhaps colour coding, or including the list name as a tweet header to easily pick out custom topics in a single feed.
Currently with Twhirl that’s accomplished by its activated keyword searches which you can opt to have displayed in the main feed, and they appear with a different ‘label’ icon (new gets a star, searched tweets get a blue doe). In this sense, I think Twhirl’s already on its way.
But certainly I hope to see the next version of major twitter apps, both PC and mobile versions, to have intuitive list control and views.
Uh, I guess I should have read the comments first
That said, I actually think the reduced @ displays is better. I didn’t at first, but I realized that if I really wanted to see people’s comments to people I didn’t know, then I could just view their public tweet list. Knowing that people will realize that if they -want- more of their followers to see their replies to someone they don’t know, they’d start the tweet with something other than the @ reply (like a period, or putting the @ name in the middle of the sentence) – I think it’s all sorted itself out. Just took a bit of getting used to.
Would it be interesting to be able to add you to a list, but also adding specific #tags. so messages from @seanbonner containing #internet would be available via that particular list. That way, your coffee rants are filtered from an internet/tech/web related list.
[...] Prediction About Twitter Lists (Sean Bonner) [...]
You make some really good points but I’m not sure I’d take advantage of the list feature regardless. All of someone’s personal tweets still get put in that list that I created for a specific purpose and I’d have to filter through them no matter what. It’s kind of like with the groups feature on other services, I meticulously assembled them and then largely ignored them when done. Because the way I use Twitter relies heavily on getting a sense of someone. I don’t care what some tech person says if I haven’t gotten a good sense of what type of stuff they gravitate towards or appreciate. The key to Twitter for me will always be keeping a manageable follow list and maybe finding a few people really tapped into stuff I like who will filter stuff out for me and hopefully RT the gems I am missing. But that’s just me and the great thing about twitter is that there are a million ways to use it and have a good experience. In any event, I have judged your logic sound Mr. Bonner.
[...] a comment » *Twitter: One prediction about Twitter’s new list functionality – “Once it’s understood that you don’t [...]
[...] Prediction About Twitter Lists | Sean Bonner [...]
[...] other day I made some predictions about twitter lists and after a week or so of using them I thought I’d report back at least how I was using them [...]
[...] to use TweetDeck despite it’s buggyness is how flawless it handles retweets. And after the awesome launch of ‘lists’ I instantly assumed Twitter was on a roll of bad ass feature [...]