Twitter lists, I am not bothered
Lists, Lists and Lists
It appears to have set the world on fire, me?
I am not bothered
Maybe its just me but I really don’t understand the excitement over lists, I have the feature and played with it a few times and that’s it.
Scoble makes a lot of sense, Chris Brogan makes no sense and Todd Zeigler is of the opinion that the more lists you on on the more important you are, I have just added him to my “people that make no sense list”
This is just going to be another circle jerk in my opinion, can you hear it now?
How many followers do you have?
Well you beat me, How many lists are you on though?
Aha, I win
This is not the twitter that I use and love and only adds to the echo chamber
amen.
Come come, Pat. Why the long face?
Use lists creatively. I organised people into different fabrics - cotton, linen, silk, satin, corduroy, and denim. What does it all mean?
I’m very happy that some people have added me to their lists, but like yourself, after one or two attempts, I simply don’t see the point in the effort.
The people I follow (on my joescanlon twitter account) are already on my list. I will not rate anyone on how many lists they are on just as much as I don’t rate them on how many followers they have.
So +1 on the “I am not bothered”
Word.
I’m doing private twitter lists per RSS with netvibes since I signed up on twitter so I’m not too excited about the new lists feature. On one hand it will make it easier to maintain my lists now as it’s integrated in the service. On the other it means I have to migrate my old lists manually. That’s timeconsuming and boring work.
I see the possibility of public ‘I’m listed on XX lists’ stats adding to the circle jerk effect, the echo chamber already seen with follower stats pissing contests.
However I hope it will add to improved discoverability of interesting relevant people.
The number of people I hear saying that lists don’t mean much to them and they won’t be bothering with them only reminds me of the people who say that twitter itself doesn’t mean much and they won’t be bothering with it.
Forget the numbers game; lists can of course be used badly, just like twitter itself - but they’re a very powerful feature which aids communication.
They can greatly reduce the noise and echo chamber as well as add to it, and as you note they aid discoverabillity - and much more effectively than the farce which #followfriday became.
It’s very early days yet and will take some time to settle down and evolve further, but it’s possible they could redefine twitter - yes the twitter you know and love - just as twitter has redefined for many of us how communication works.
I think the lists will prove useful. I seem them at present as just a tagging method for filtering. Nothing more. If you are a commercial enterprise, they will be handy.
if you had a pizza shop for instance, you could keep tags on customers, for offers, updates etc etc
One other method thats not commercial enterprise driven, would be for example, If you created a list for say, “breaking news”, then you effectively have a form of twitter newspaper. With your own personal/commercial correspondents. etc etc.
For personal, it find lists about as useful as tits on a bull. And I paraphrase the groucho marx outlook and theory of not wanting to be part of any “list” that would have me!! …well, most of em! :p (Sexiest Irish male list, and sexiest Irish male, 8 years running list, or Most sexy Irish male likely to cause great offense and or international incident list aside) /:p
My post sort of addresses my feeling about the lists and the reality that you only get on the lists of those in your world. It’s not like being on a list someone like Leo or Scoble make really means you have arrived because while I believe with every part of me that I am as social media savvy as those on Scobles social media guru list, I am not on there and I’m not for one very important reason; I’m not on his radar in this way. I think that you’re right Pat. But my opinion will be way down the list of what matters on this debate. I accept it. I’m not an insider in any visible industry but my opinion won’t change. My answers are as right as anyone else. http://stardustglobalventures.com/2009/10/31/influence-and-insiders-and-the-new-sul-suggested-user-list/
Horses for courses.
I enjoy being on Dean Whitbread’s list because that means I’m in his phone and worthy of being picked up when I ring. However, Dean has some very creative list titles and that has to be considered by people who simply count numbers.
I also enjoyed making a list of people who owe me a pint because of the guilt factor it induced with people too polite to question if they really did owe me one.
The numbers game is a sad development of Lists but we can ignore it.
Lists are useful at work. We can maintain a “co-workers who Tweet” list and people can easily subscribe to that list. As people come and go in the organisation we update the list accordingly.
Also useful for organising Twitter for your own purposes, forget what it does or means to others.
Amen Pat!
Lists are not a bad idea if well executed.
It lacks important features:
- why show # of followers? Useless.
- I want to get a notification each time I’m added to a list
- I want to be able to opt-out a list.
- A report list as inappropriate is absolutely necessary.
For now -as is- they have 0 interest to me.
Pat,
I agree with your general amusement at the ego of the wanna B-listers, but I think you’ve missed what is essentially useful about lists.
Discovery!
If you want to use twitter to discover new peeps relevant to your interests, the lists allows you to understand why your existing friends are following or being followed by strangers. For instance, it’s pretty time-consuming to wade through someone’s followers list to see which stranger is a personal friend, work colleague, who’s a teammate for the local club, who’s a fellow music fan and who’s a technology peer. Lists allows that segmentation to ease discovery of new friends.
That is better than the present mess on twitter, so don’t be so harsh on those who are engaged in list envy. It’s all about quality, as they say.
Pat, I’m not bothered at the moment either. While I do see how lists could potentially add another benifit to the Twitter experiece, for now I’m happy with the way things are currently going. And Lists are just Groups with another name really, it’s nothing revolutionary!
Donagh