Twitter Lists Finally Making It to the Masses
We'd all heard for some time that Twitter would be getting lists. Some lucky participants have been enjoying the new organizational and follower-sharing tool since last week, but Twitter has finally introduced the service to a significant swath of its general population. Some may still not have access, but if you do, you'll know by the large dialog box (pictured above) on the home page, alerting you to the availability of the feature.
Creating a list is simple, if a little clumsy. You can click the "new list" button in that big dialog box that appears above your tweets, or in the right-hand navigation bar. You'll then be asked to name the list and decide if it's going to be public (everyone can view) or private (just for your own organizational purposes). You'll then see a search box where you can start typing the names of users you want to add. When you get the results, you'll see a new button next to the user's name. This will allow you to pick the proper list for said user. You'll see the same button while browsing people you follow.
Unfortunately, there is no nifty auto-complete for the search box, or way to add users in batches; each one must be added individually. You can also add yourself to lists, but only from your profile page, not with the actual list-creation tool. In one interesting quirk, pointed out by Ben Rose to the Guardian, you don't have to follow someone to have them on a list. If you add someone you don't follow, their tweets will still appear, making it easy to covertly follow (stalk) people -- a boon for the crazy ex sect.
CNET is sold on the usefulness of lists for finding users you might not have otherwise known to follow. But since each list constitutes its own page, we don't consider this to be an easy way of reading tweets for the large number of people you're following. (For that, try TweetDeck.)
A site, Listorious, has already sprung up, cataloging great lists curated by people on Twitter, including collections of the Twitter staff and the editorial team at 'The Onion.' We, of course, would never want to be left out of the fun. You can find all your favorite Switched staffers here. [From: Guardian, Download Squad and CNET]
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