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Twitter's lists

Thursday, October 15, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Like a bunch of other people I had the new Twitter lists feature turned on today. Immediately I needed a list to explore and had a bunch of ready-made ideas. I had already done aggregated feeds of the top 100 most followed people on Twitter, the employees of the Twitter company and the NY Times, the Twin Cities and most recently Berkeley Twitterers.  

The last one I replicated as a Twitter list.  

If you don't yet have the feature turned on, you'll get a blank page on the last link. Here's a screen shot of what it looks like.  

Basically you get a flow of all the people I've chosen to put on the Berkeley list. 

Depending on what the API looks like we'll probably see all kinds of tools for combining and cloning lists.  

It's a new authority system. The number of lists you appear on is a kind of page-rank. So let's hope Twitter does two things: 1. Provides an open API to crawl this data set. 2. Doesn't pollute it by artificially inflating the rank of friendly press and their industry friends. Stay out of the editorial space and let a healthy ecosystem develop. It's another chance to not screw it up. 

Some people have said it's somehow related to the Suggested User List but I don't see it at all. This feature is for advanced users, the SUL is for total newbies. Unless Twitter somehow data mines our lists, something they could have done right at the start, it won't have any impact on the newbies' user experience. 

Update: As you would expect, Scoble is going crrrazy with this feature!