Twitter Lists Good? Bad? Ugly?
by Roger
So what do you think?
So far I made a few lists but ended up deleting them, one has become pretty popular although intentionally trying to name it impersonally and in a niche I have still had several complaints from people.
Why am I not on it?
I can see they are a cool way to find people to follow but when I follow someone I really follow them I want them in my mainstream and I want them to know I’m following them.
Chris doesn’t like them! Robert loves them!
I’m trying something new, in preparation of Tweetdeck‘s support of lists which I hope is imminent, yesterday I started using Socialoomph formally known as TweetLater.
This tool has a Friend Finder feature, normally that would be used probably by some marketer’s to find people talking about certain keywords, but they have also added a new feature for lists.
In short terms this service finds people mentioning me ‘imrogb‘ and adds them to a queue for me to vet which I then manually approve or reject and then it follows the approved people and puts them in a list of my choosing.How are you using lists? Are you finding value yet or is Desktop client integration holding you back?
If you enjoyed this post please share and subscribe to our feed via RSS or Email. Thanks!
Comments
I use list to determine if I should follow someone. And I made the private friend list to monitor what my friend doing without following them (since not all of them tweet like a human). Overall, it is a nice new feature…
Think it is still better to have that option. Atleast it`s a good way to manage accounts. You can still personally follow people if it matters. But you can manage galleries or museums, news etc. Like that.
Too much work to create them in my opinion. I took the time to create one. It took a while to do and I haven't been back to look at it since, or anyone else's for that matter.
Also it's opened up this whole other 'How many lists are you on?' culture, which is just horrible. What's next? Twitter Groups? Twitter Teams?
Meh.
@Paddy I agree its too difficult right now but hopefully some of the desktop clients will change that, also agree its a bit of a contest but my lists apart from 2 are private for me to use (and whats the influence of being on 1000 lists if no one follows any of those lists? so the number is irrelevant as any kind of measure ), In the end they are not much different from tweetdeck groups really but with using the twitter api hopefully easier to manage and the possibility to share…
I haven't made any lists yet as I am not the kind of person who 'organises' my links, so organising my followers / people I follow will be tough.
I do see value in it for people who are looking to find a good group of people to follow in their niche, but I can see the issues which can crop up. For now I am just going to see how it goes, if I really feel a need then I will start playing around with lists.
p.s Why am I not on your design list? ;) joking mate
I think the value comes in many ways as you have more and more followers or search columns or twitter accounts to monitor, but I think everyone is finding their feet and will see if lists are useful to them or not, this technique is just an experiment who knows what next week will bring!
About being on the list really I know you're joking but I got people who said Sorry I can't retweet that because so and so isn't on it and it will cause me trouble…
Unbelievable!
It's a nice way of organising the people you follow, for sure, but then I only follow a small manageable number of people. I agree with Chris Brogan though, it's also excludes people and you end up with problems like you've been having, with people asking 'why am I not on your list?'.
Another problem I have is having a list with more than around 20 people on it. These lists that float around with 300 people on it are insanely noisy and useless. It's like these '400+ web designers to follow on Twitter' blog posts that used to be all the rage. No one could ever have the time to sit and go through every person on it.
Tweetdeck? Yeugh. I tried using it for a day but there was waaaay too much going on at once. Felt like I was in control of a plane. Tweetie is where you want to go. Far sexier and more usable.
That is rather shocking they just don't get it. I think too many of us hold ourselves in too high regard. Some people need a reality check.
I use list to grouping my friends. So I can easily check their updates. :P
I have no time for lists you see, I swim in the stream consistently for all to see. and if I went and made some lists so much stuff I would have missed :( Twitter is the here and now unlike FB where you just see true interacting there is rare for me but Twitter brings it home as talking around the world you roam.