Twitter Lists – Useful!

I have to confess that when Twitter’s new “list” feature was announced my response was a well-reasoned “meh.” I just didn’t see the point and had little interest in investigating…

Fortunately (for me!) I decided to play around the feature a bit this morning. Right away, my first thought was that it would be cool to exclude a list from my main feed.

For instance, let me group up all the SQL server gurus that I follow but not show them in my main list (They’ve all been at PASS this week and the tweet-volume was a bit much!). I logged the suggestion and was dismayed to see it was almost immediately closed – as “Solved.”

Clearly, a hint that I’m missing something obvious…

About 2 minutes later I was looking at someone’s twitter profile and realized I could add them to a list – without having to Follow them first.

Suddenly I became a big fan of Twitter lists! (and if this was painfully obvious to you from the beginning just have pity on me for being a bit slow on this one…)

I’ll admit there have been a lot of people that I considered following on twitter but just didn’t want to see them in my main twitter view. Maybe they post a little too much or a little too “inappropriately” (for over the shoulder views) or even too specialized. Now I can just add them to a list but not directly follow them. I can just periodically check on my lists to see what’s going on.

Frankly, I bet this is going to drop overall “Follow” counts system-wide…

Now, when will all the Twitter clients start offering support to view our lists?

[You can find me on Twitter as Chris_Kasten. Follow or add me to a list!]

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