Twitter List To Help Organize Information
The Lists feature was rolled out Wednesday on the company's official blog. For the time being, the feature is only being offered to a small set of users who are being encouraged to form lists of Twitter followers.
"The idea is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense," Nick Kallen, project lead, wrote on Twitter's blog.
Instituting Lists can achieve two goals, both for the individual Twitter users and his or her followers. First, it lets a user more easily track what the people they follow are up to while simultaneously making it easier for other people to track that user's followers, something users of the social network have long been asking for.
"Lists are public by default [but can be made private] and the lists you've created are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts," Kallen wrote.
The biggest gripe that some people new to the 140 character-at-a-time social network have is that getting started and becoming an effective user can be difficult. Questions like, 'Who do I follow?'; 'What do I tweet about?'; 'Why are these people following me?', are all common.
Once Twitter Lists rolls out the Web site, interacting with the network will become quite a bit easier. It should be noted that other Twitter clients, such as TweetDeck for example, have long provided group functionalities, leading many users to use the network through a third-party application rather than Twitter.com.
Kallen is quick to note in the blog post that Twitter will continue to work with those third-party applications.
"[T]he Platform team will follow up in a few days with information on the Lists API. This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps," Kallen wrote.