iWeb Communities: Blog

Maybe you’ve heard about the new feature on Twitter: lists. It’s a tool which allows you to create a list or group in which you can add users.

The benefit of those lists is that it will easier for you to follow someone. For instance, iWeb can create a customer list, hosting news, competitors, employees etc. It would allow you to create groups from the website, where you can easily find the information you are looking for.

There are already people saying that the influence of someone on Twitter will be proportionnal to the number of lists he or she is belonging to. This makes sense, although many Twitter users don’t send their tweets via the website. They use applications like Tweetdeck, Tweetie and others, because following is much easier, with new tweet alerts, or user mentions.

People using Tweetdeck already have many created groups depending on the interests / jobs. Are those people going to Twitter to create lists manually, while they are not yet supported by their preferred Twitter application? I highly doubt it.

We must wait several weeks before a Twitter application uses well lists, and members using this to classify their friends lists. This application must allow the creation without going to the Twitter website, and users should be able to modify lists from the application.

Until then, lists are going to be used mainly by people wanting to try it out on the Twitter.com website, but they will come back quickly to their tweetdecks. Since it won’t be used fully, we can’t say then that it’s a metric to measure Twitter influence.

Soon yes. Now, not yet.