Twitter Lists; Limitations, bugs, impact, and brilliance
First off, I +love+ the new list feature that's coming to Twitter. Last week more than 1,000 people were randomly added to a beta of the new feature. What does it do? It does a few things (TechCrunch wrote an article about the new feature and has screen shots which show what it looks like):
- It lets you put the people you are following into lists. (I have several lists, for instance, one for photographers, another for tech executives, another for my most favorited Twitterers, and another for programmers).
- It lets you see a feed for each list. The feed is made up of only the people on that list.
- If you are the person who made the list you can delete or add people to the list.
- You can block the user of any list.
- You can subscribe to any list, which will add it to your home page and other places.
- You can later delete any list.
- You can later rename any list (that's pretty cool, although renaming does change the URL of the list).
On your home page you'll see a few changes:
- You'll see a new "listed" item. That tells you how many lists you have been added to.
- You'll see a new "Lists" area on the right side of your page which shows you which lists you've made and which ones you've followed (up to a maximum of 20).
- If you click on a list name, you'll see the timeline for just that list and you'll also see "view list page." If you click on that you'll see the people that the list is following and who is following the list. You'll also see you can edit or delete the list there.
I've used this feature extensively now and I've found several limitations:
- You can only add 20 lists to one Twitter account.
- Each list can only have 500 members.
- Your sidebar can only display 20 lists. First it will display your lists, then others but you won't be able to control the order or really anything about the list. I even tried changing the spelling on the lists.
- If you click on "listed" on your home page, you'll see a list of the lists that have added you. Unfortunately only the last 20 will be listed and you can't see others. I already have more than 200 lists following me and I can't see most of those.
- There is a tab that shows you the lists you follow. However, in my case, it only is showing 39 lists. I know I'm actually following about double that amount already. And of course you can't scroll the list or anything like that. I believe these last two limitations are actually bugs or poor design decisions.
What will the impact be of this new feature?
- You'll follow a lot more people. Why? Because you'll find someone who has done a really great list, say, of programmers, and you'll add the whole list. I've already done this a LOT and found that Twitter has gotten way more interesting because of it.
- You will spend a lot of time managing lists, at least at first. I went through that over on FriendFeed, which has a similar feature (Twitter's implementation is better, by the way).
- I can see a raft of new searching and discovery mechanisms. Already I've been invited to the beta test of a new directory service. Which brings me to the next point.
- Directories based on numbers of followers are dead. Yes, Wefollow, I'm looking at you.
- Anything to do with numbers of followers is now dead. WHAT KIND OF LISTS you are on will be far more important. Who cares if someone has 145,000 followers if no one will put him on a list because they don't like his Tweet style?
- Follow Friday is dead. Lists are FAR superior.
- Twitter will have scaling problems almost immediately due to these lists because lots of people will start using Twitter more again.
I'm hitting a variety of bugs, too.
- First the technology is very slow. It sometimes takes up to a minute after I click to add someone to a list before it releases the UI and shows that that person has been added to the list (if you visit your "following" list you can click a drop-down menu and then you'll be able to click to add that person to one or more of your lists. Sometimes this is very fast, othertimes it's dreadfully slow).
- Sometimes I click to add someone to a list and it doesn't add them.
While I'm here, I do have one feature request. I'd like to add all the people on someone else's list to mine. For instance, I've found a couple of lists of Rackspace employees already. Why can't I visit those lists and say "add all the list members to one of my own lists?" That would be very useful. Or have a way to add groups of people from your following list instead of forcing us to add people one-by-one.
Anyway, if you are playing with the new list feature, how do you like it? What bugs are you hitting? Are you hitting any limitations?
Oh, and if you don't like it that I have access to this new feature, sorry, but lets meet after you get it and see if you agree or disagree with me on this.
I say that this is all brilliant because it instantly made Twitter much more usable and interesting again. It will be fun to watch when everyone gets to see this new feature and try it for themselves. I think it'll be VERY popular.
UPDATE: If you have an account that is "list enabled" you can check out my lists on my Twitter account. They are going to need a lot more work, but already you can see the direction I'm heading in with them.
