Twitter Lists Explained

Twitter recently introduced a new feature called Twitter Lists. Before Twitter Lists Twitter users could only look at the messages that one Twitter user send and received. This could include messages from friends, colleagues but also from mums and dads. If you for instance wanted to find the most influential Twitter users in politics or technology you would have to do a lot of research off-site to find the names that you were looking for.

Twitter Lists introduces a new feature that third party websites have been offering for a while. A comprehensive option to build a list of Twitter users on any subject. This can be a list of all students in business 101, a list of local politicians who use Twitter or a list of the world’s most popular thinkers.

The main benefit of this approach is that someone can access the public messages of all the Twitter users in that list from the Twitter Lists page. It is possible to subscribe to a Twitter list to receive the usual updates when someone on the list posts a new message.

To sum it up: Twitter Lists makes it easier to combine the messages of various Twitter users under one roof without having to filter through additional noise that is created by messages that they receive in their standard Twitter Account.

There is still one question to be answered: How can someone find the best lists without having to manually look at the pages of Twitter users? The answer, at least for lists of prominent Twitter users, is Listorious. The service maintains a list of (currently) 140 Twitter lists sorted in categories like media, news, marketing, health or finance.

This is a good starting point to find lists of prominent Twitter users like all verified NFL players who use Twitter, journalists who cover finance and business or thought leaders of this world. On the other hand; You won’t find your high-school’s teachers there.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Tuesday November 3, 2009 -
Tags:listorious, messaging, twitter, twitter lists