Stop saying Twitter is useless! Because now there are Twitter lists

Have you played around with Twitter‘s new lists feature yet? Well, you should, because lists take Twitter from “pretty cool” to “OMG I can’t live without Twitter!”

The idea behind lists is actually super simple (and staying super simple is part of what makes Twitter so great). Basically, you can group some of your Tweeple (i.e., people you follow on Twitter) into a list.

But here’s why this is so awesome:

• You can group people by any criteria you choose and then go to the list to see a timeline of only their tweets. For example, you may want to check in on just the people you work with or the celebrities you’re stalking.
• If you put someone on a list, you don’t have to follow them. You can still see their tweets by accessing the list. So you can limit your main Twitter timeline to only the people you truly care about. I am now actively following only about 50 people, which is a lot easier to keep up with. Since I keep Twitter open on my iGoogle page, it is extra-nice to get rid of the excess noise.
• You can follow other people’s lists. So you don’t even have to go to all the trouble of making your own. People have made lists for every possible category. Here’s the place to find the best of them.
• If you’re following someone on a Twitter list, why do you have to bother reading their blog anymore? (No, wait, you should still read my blog.)

So I have made a few lists that you may or may not want to follow. They are:

• they-amuse-me – funny folks
• ict4d-nptech – do-gooding techies
• misc-tech — tech news
• news – general news
• book-media-news – book and media news (doy!)
• science-stuff – science news
• misc-celebs – a small selection of interesting famous people

And a few others. Visit my Twitter page to see them all.

Now that Twitter is finally integrating retweets into its web interface, there will be no end to its usefulness. We can just pretty much ignore Facebook and StumbleUpon as no longer relevant.

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