Twitter Lists - A Quiet Revolution

I've been playing with the new Lists feature over at Twitter for about a week now, and I gotta say I'm really liking it. Like Twitter itself, Lists is such a simple mechanism and yet it offers such a range of possibilities. I have a couple of things on my wish list for Lists, but I'll get to those in a second.

Lists didn't 100% click for me until last night, when I read this blog post by Sean Bonner (@seanbonner). I read this part, and it went *CLICK!* in my brain:

Once it’s understood that you don’t have to be following someone to add them to a list people will begin to adjust who they are following to those they actually know and interact with moving news and site feeds, or celebs and joke accounts over to lists...

So my prediction is as people get more of a grasp on lists, they will stop following celebs they never actually speak with in favor of adding them to a list of celebs, they will stop following CNN and BBC news feeds in favor of creating a news list, they will stop following bands they like listening to in favor of a music list.

(emphasis mine)

This solves an age-old problem with Twitter: information overload. There are so many cool people to follow, and so many "products" to keep up with, that your Twitter stream can quickly become murky and polluted.

My solution till now has been to limit myself to following 50 people max, with the intention of making those 50 the ones who post the most interesting stuff the most frequently. I would regularly go through my follow list and find people who hadn't updated in days/weeks, or who I could not remember posting anything I was interested in, and unfollow those people. I also forced myself to resist the urge to follow companies and products I like -- though I may want to keep up with what's happening with them, I also don't want that stuff cluttering up the stream of info coming from people I like to actually communicate with.

Thanks to Sean kicking my brain into gear with his blog post, I've now figured out how to use Twitter Lists to suit me. My system goes like this: there's those I will follow (Really Follow™) and those I will "sorta" follow by putting them into lists.

My criteria for Really Following™ someone:

1. Number one priority? Real people. Specifically, real people who I can communicate with, bounce ideas off of, and link to on a regular basis.
2. Next would be celebrities who post often, and who post good stuff I am truly interested in -- like @leolaporte and @wilw. These are celebrities who will actually respond to their followers (hi, @jason!) instead of just spamming a one-way stream of stuff with no interaction (hi, @oprah!).

And lists? Lists will be for two purposes:

1. Making high-quality lists of high-quality people, so I can easily recommend all those people at once. This solves my #FollowFriday problem where I have to post 4 or 5 times just to say WHY I'm recommending the people I am. Now I can tell you that if you want some great inspiration from wonderful people, you should check out my @hochmann/twitter-muses list. Or if you're interested in Buddhism, you can browse my @hochmann/sangha list.
2. Collecting users/services I want easy access to, but who I don't want distracting me from the Real People™ I actually follow. A great example would be my @hochmann/anti-boredom list, which is made up of feeds from fun sites like Digg and Mental Floss.

Doing things this way excites me, because it means I can keep the down-to-earth, interesting people I want in my main Twitter feed. People I care about, the cream of my hyperpersonal news stream crop, will always be there at the top. When I want to drill down into a specific group, that's what Lists are for.