Twitter Lists Makes its Debut

Twitter getting smarter

Twitter is trying to organize and promote tweeters with yesterday’s release of their new feature, “Twitter Lists”.  It is not available to everyone just yet.  For the last year and a half, we have relied on applications like TweetDeck and Seesmic to organize our twitter followers into categories and groups.  Outside of these applications and being able to monitor mentions and direct messages on twitter directly, you were left with a constant endless stream of status updates of all the people you were following, unless you followed a small amount of tweeters.

If you don’t already use tools like TweetDeck, then this new feature, which came out yesterday, will enhance the way you use twitter.  Like other applications, now directly on twitter, you can use the new feature to organize your followers into groups.  For example, you may want to group all your close friends and follow them more closely and or group all your business contacts.  Other group ideas may include people in your local area, prospects in a particular vertical, and competitors.  Besides being able to monitor these groups seperately, it will show on your twitter profile page and you can also publish your lists via your tweets.   So instead of referencing individual handles in your tweets, you can reference an entire list of tweeters in your individual tweets.

The benefit?  Higher visibility for the smaller tweeter.  Cool feature, but not a game changer as of yet.   Keep an eye out for applications to enrich this feature in the future.

…… @rubenq