What I Love About Twitter Lists
Lists enable completely different Twitter experiences with minimal effort
Twitter’s “lists” feature is one my favorite features. Not many people know about lists, or seem to use them very often, but they’re awesome. Let me explain why.
A visual example lays it out pretty clear:
Notice anything? Zero overlap in this view. Of course, there’s overlap overall, but it’s a small enough amount to where I barely notice.
Most of who I follow on Twitter are my developer friends, or those I don’t know but admire. But a small percentage of the people I follow fall into various sub-categories, which I sometimes organize into lists. I have a VCs list for venture capitalists I follow, a laugh list for comedians, and a few others.
Categorizing the people I follow on Twitter into lists like this enables an experience completely unique to what makes up most of my standard “timeline”. It’s a different overall tone, different subject matter, different types of people, different all around.
Using Twitter like this peppers some much-needed thought diversity into an otherwise homogenous timeline of my tech-centric developer friends.
At any given time, I can open up Twitter, click over to one of my lists, and get a completely different experience of Twitter. For many products, this could be a complete nightmare. But the product experience isn’t changing, just the content. It’s content curated however I want at any given time of time.
No More Tweets, End of Stream
I don’t follow that many people on Twitter; at today’s count, 815. That means that every time I browse my timeline, there’s a never-ending stream of noise for me to read.
But I can check my different lists once per day, and within a few minutes I’m done. Task completed. I’ve learned all the knowledge that segment of people has to offer, and the tweet stream rolls over to what I read the previous day. That’s right: I run out of Tweets to read. Holy shit ARMAGEDDON.
It’s a weird position we’ve found ourselves in here on the Internet — an endless river of content to consume, apps to check, unread counts to battle, updates to read, everyone and everything vying for your attention all the time. On the contrary, arriving at a view of a product that confidently proclaims, “thanks, but that’s all we have for you today, you’re done”, is refreshingly calming.
