Twitter Lists of Them

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?).