Last night A week or so ago I made a small list on Twitter – simply called ‘them.’ It was a tedious task, as for the most part Twitter didn’t seem to want to accept most of the names I selected without being told several times. This is the list of people I have in a separate column in Tweetdeck, and funnily enough that column is also called ‘them.’ Imaginative eh?

Twitter Lists Notification
So who is on this small list of ~70 people? It’s not a list SEOs (although many of them pretty much all of them are involved in search or social media or some other related discipline in some way or another); it’s really a mixed bag. Some of them are people I know, some are folk that I can have a bit of banter with, others are just great at sharing really cool information. A good variety. Most are friendly and talkative. All of them I respect.
I’ve since made a few other lists, and had the honour of being featured on a couple too (I must’ve said something good once!). There’s a small list of kith and kin, which is mostly useless as most of my family don’t use the twitter anyway but it is redeemed by my IRL good friends, and a very small list of tweet-comedians.
Seems the buzz has died down about these lists now; there’s been several news cycles since. There was also some ongoing angst that not everyone got the feature at the same time. But they will remain useful in a number of ways. Whether they’ll replace the twitter directories that have sprung up remains to be seen – the functionality of following everyone in a list is not available in Twitter’s implementation (although you can follow the list itself). It’s certainly another potential social ranking system that the search engines could make use of now that they have access to the tweet stream – the more lists you appear on, the more influential you might be (another spammers’ delight?).




While I Have a Sec.. Tweetdeck Doesn’t Sync
Tweetdeck for iPhone
Tweetdeck is great. Tweetdeck for iPhone is great. I’ve tried plenty of other twitter clients, but I’ve always ended up back at Tweetdeck. It just does what I want it to do, and I guess there’s now some of that inertia – it’s hassle to move (despite twitter lists which makes the web interface much more usable).
But. There has to be a but, eh? A few months ago when they released the iPhone client a big feature was that you could sync your columns between your desktop clients and your phone. Sounded pretty good. Didn’t work for me, and a few others. They said they’d fix it, and within a few weeks there was a new version to download form the appstore. But. Still didn’t work for me. I’ve been through some hoopla trying to get it to work (and most of my not inconsiderable list of email addresses); still no joy.
Very recently, I’ve replaced TD on my phone with SimplyTweet and Tweetie2. Can’t pick between them. Had to go through the hassle of setting up lists on each one, but that’s because you can’t import/export them between clients or web. Yet. You should try them both, either is thoroughly worthy of the few quid they charge.
Tweetie is feature rich and easy to use. Very simple to pick up – nice and intuitive.
SimplyTweet is equally appealing, but annoying because of its best feature – push updates. Great when on phone only… but not when at my desk because my phone get updates I’ve already seen. And there’s no way to turn it off. Wish there was some way to sync desktop to phone.. (and I’m back where I started. someone needs to get this right.)