Twitter isn’t obviously the first (or the last) but may definitely be the most amusing in how it exposes how an infinite number of base interpretations can be attached to appearances on lists. Humans have made and kept lists since the ancients. Umberto Eco who is resident at the Louvre these days has undertaken a fabulous study of lists of all manner. The illustrated book is called The Vertigo/ Infinity of Lists in the UK/ USA respectively.

@joe +2 on the “I am not bothered”

cheers pat

That will be intersting.

Donagh

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.

For now -as is- they have 0 interest to me.

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.

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.