These days, everybody and their cat is on Twitter. (Shout out to @grandmawrinkles, the hairless feline of Real Housewives of New Jersey!) But if you follow every reality-show pet, pro athlete, and hot dog vendor you come across, your main Twitter feed quickly gets out of control. Twitter lists have been around less than a year but are still mainly the realm of power users, even though casual users could benefit from them just as much--if not more.
Seeing the public lists you’ve been added to is always fun. Mine are mostly tech-related, with some location-based lists and an alumni network thrown in for good measure.
The list feature lets you create groups of users into one Twitter feed, which you then follow. The list gets its own URL (public or private) and a link in your sidebar on Twitter.com. Many Twitter clients support reading lists, too. Why bother? Lists have two big advantages: Posts in a list aren’t added to your main timeline--you have to go look for them specifically, when you really want to read them. And second, you don’t have to follow all the users on a list, just the list itself. So by grouping some--or even most--of the people you follow into lists, you can unfollow them. Voilá--you get to keep track of more users and tweets while following fewer people in real time.
Difficulty Level: Easy
What You Need:
>> Twitter account (free, twitter.com)
Creating a list couldn't be much simpler.
Log in to your account at Twitter.com. Even if you normally use a Twitter client like TweetDeck or Tweetie, it’s easier to get acquainted with lists by seeing Twitter’s own implementation. Plus, we’ll wind up using a lot of browser tabs. To create a list, look for the New List link in the sidebar on the right and click it. Name your list something good, because if you change it later the URL changes too--try a topic-based one, like Mac News. If your list is public, anyone can see it and follow it. If it’s private, nobody can see it, and the people who are on it don’t know it exists.
Add to a list (top), and unfollow (bottom)--although we would never actually unfollow Gordon Mah Ung.
Your list is created empty. To fill it up with people you already follow, look to the top right of the page and click the Following link under your profile picture. That gives you a page of everyone you follow, and you can add them to lists with the list button to the right of each person’s name. You can add people to as many lists as you like and even create a new list right from this dialog. The gear button to the right of the list button has a link to then unfollow the person, if having them in a list--and not your main timeline--is sufficient for you.
Follow and unfollow other people's lists from their specific list pages.
If you know any power users, check out their Twitter pages and peruse the lists in the sidebar--we like to open each list in a new browser tab. You can subscribe to an entire list with the “Follow this list” button at the upper-left corner of that list’s page, which puts the list in your sidebar for you to read when you like. Even lists that follow hundreds of users (the limit is 500) won’t clutter up your main timeline with posts, so go crazy. Listorious.com and TLists.com let you search for lists that fit your interests and add yours to the directory--everything’s tagged for easy browsing.
Widgets can show off your nifty list to the world...wide web.
Your public list gets a link that you can share far and wide. Twitter lets users embed lists into webpages as a constantly updating widget, perfect for your blog’s sidebar. (You’ll find a handy wizard for customizing that widget at twitter.com/goodies.) Creating a quality list that people want to follow can help your own influence and reach--it shows you know your stuff.
Lists can also just make your own Twitter experience more uncluttered, so you can pay attention to the tweets you really want to see. Create groups for your organization, around a topic you care about, or as a dumping ground for guilty pleasures. Put accounts you “have to read” in one list for occasional monitoring during the workday and the “fun to read” ones in another that you peruse on your commute home. It puts Twitter more on your terms.
TweetDeck handles lists beautifully--it had a similar Groups feature before lists came to Twitter.
Tons of Twitter desktop clients and mobile apps support reading lists, including TweetDeck, Twitter for iPhone (formerly Tweetie for iPhone), Seesmic, Socialite, Twittelator, HootSuite, and more. Mobile devices are especially great for this--try keeping a list of Twitter users who crack you up for an instant pick-me-up anytime.
Favstar.fm involves favorites and lists and really large fonts.
ListiMonkey.com will email you the posts from your list hourly or daily, optionally filtered by keywords. And Favstar.fm will auto-generate a list of the 20 people whose tweets you’ve favorited the most. It works like a regular list within Twitter, but if you read it on favstar.fm you get extra capabilities, like seeing the list members’ most recent favorite tweets, too.
Follow this article's author, Susie Ochs, on Twitter.
