Last week I was pick (among 1,000+ other tweeters)to beta test a new feature in twitter called Lists. Now you can create up to 20 list in your account and in those list can have up to 500 people in each list. This is a feature the twitter team should have added a year ago. I found the favorites list useless for its original purpose. So what I did was turned it into a makeshift list. The reason I did this was so I could follow as many people as I wanted to without losing track of tweeters I follow closely. Now I can use favorites for what it was intended for, listing favorite tweets.
So what is the impact of Lists?
1. You'll follow a lot more people. Why? Because you'll find someone who has done a really great list, say, of programmers, and you'll add the whole list. You will find that Twitter will get way more interesting because of it.
2. This will bring a raft of new searching and discovery mechanisms.
3. Directories based on numbers of followers are dead. Services like WeFollow are pointless.
4. Anything to do with numbers of followers is now dead. Yeay! WHAT KIND OF LISTS you are on will be far more important. Who cares if someone has 200,000 followers if no one will put him on a list because they don't like their Tweet style?
5. Follow Friday is dead! Lists are far superior. Now your lists will take over this practice.
6. Twitter will have scaling problems almost immediately due to these lists because lots of people will start using Twitter more again.
The system is still a bit buggy and has other issues that need to be addressed.
1. Your sidebar can only display 20 lists. First it will display your lists, then others but you won't be able to control the order or really anything about the list. You can't even change the spelling on the lists.
2. If you click on "listed" on your home page, you'll see a list of the lists that have added you. Unfortunately only the last 20 will be listed and you can't see others. If you have more than 200 lists following you, you can't see those lists.
I mention before that twitter will die due to the onslaught of other networking service i.e. FaceBook and Google Wave. With the advent of this new feature, I think it will extend the life of twitter, but it's no cure to its woes. What we will see now is a race to get on high profile or celebrity lists.
If you have the List feature, what is your opinion about this new tool?
