Twitters Lists Land, for Some Anyway

By Jake • October 29th, 2009 • View Comments

So, finally, Twitter has finally dropped a grouping feature, called Lists, at least to some users, including @oraclemix and @theappslab.

Rich (@rmanlan) had them earlier in the week, too. Guess who’s out in the cold? Yours truly (@jkuramot), or at least I was when I started this post. Now, I’m in the club too.

Lists finally, what took so long?

I, among many others, have been quizzically wondering for years why groups weren’t in the app from the beginning.

The lack of a grouping feature has (happily) spawned several great client apps, including TweetDeck, which had them first, and more recently, Brizzly, which I know I promised to cover and will, eventually.

So, what’s the big deal? Well, Twitter needs groups because as you follow more people, your tweetstream gets more noisy, making it way tougher to find useful and interesting content, assuming you believe this type of content exists on Twitter.

Not everyone will agree, but for me, groups (or lists) have kept me using Twitter, even as it gets more noisy.

Anyway, if lists have been added to your account, you can create your own (public or private) to segment your tweetstream, see the public lists of other users to which you belong (a nice little ego-trip), and view the public lists of other users who have the feature.

For example, our pals at Oracle Mix created a list of the “official” Oracle Twitter accounts, which you can view and follow here (note: if you don’t have lists yet, this URL won’t work), and oh by the way, @theappslab is now an “official” account.

The official list of official Oracle accounts, officially

W00t!

Now with 33% more navel-gazingTwitter has also altered profiles to add the number of lists to which a user belongs, right next to the followers and following counts.

If you’re interested, I’ve created a list for our little team, plus sometime-contributor Matt (@topperge) and the official WebCenter account (@oraclewebcenter). Follow if you like.

I wonder how apps, especially those that have added group functionality, will handle this new feature.

So, what do you think of lists? IMO, it’s about time. Find the comments.


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  • amusingly, i didn't have lists before reading this and now i do. this is a magic post.
  • Just like me :) It is magic.
  • I think Twitter List helpful... It helps to separate interesting groups.
    Example: @oracle

    And help me read every ideas in that group easier...
  • Absolutely. It's amazing this feature took so long to arrive, like 2.5 years.
  • Yay! This is pretty awesome. Guess I need to swing by atebits.com to see if there's an a plan to expose/separate lists in Tweetie. FWIW, they seem to have dropped the "don't tweet about this" text from the beta message.
  • Is atebits up there? Sweet. I've always wanted to use Tweetie permanently, but groups kept me in TweetDeck (now Brizzly). I'd totally switch if they support lists, which is saying something b/c recreating my groups as lists is work :)
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