AlexSchleber’s Quick Hits Business Mindhacks

What will the impact be of this new feature?

1. You'll follow a lot more people. Why? Because you'll find someone who has done a really great list, say, of programmers, and you'll add the whole list. I've already done this a LOT and found that Twitter has gotten way more interesting because of it.
2. You will spend a lot of time managing lists, at least at first. I went through that over on FriendFeed, which has a similar feature (Twitter's implementation is better, by the way).
3. I can see a raft of new searching and discovery mechanisms. Already I've been invited to the beta test of a new directory service. Which brings me to the next point.
4. Directories based on numbers of followers are dead. Yes, Wefollow, I'm looking at you.
5. Anything to do with numbers of followers is now dead. WHAT KIND OF LISTS you are on will be far more important. Who cares if someone has 145,000 followers if no one will put him on a list because they don't like his Tweet style?
6. Follow Friday is dead. Lists are FAR superior.
7. Twitter will have scaling problems almost immediately due to these lists because lots of people will start using Twitter more again.

Some interesting points here, I especially agree with the idea that Lists with proper keywords in the list name will confer more authority down the road than raw follower numbers. It's a bit like anchor text of incoming links counting for a lot in Google's rankings.

I would add:

1) The creation of larger lists is currently still very cumbersome b/c we can't search over our following/followers lists by Bio or "recent tweets" keyword's to select people to add. This has been a missing feature in Twitter since well before the arrival of the new Lists of course.

2) So far, I can't see a way to get a newly minted List stream out of Twitter in any way, as there is no RSS feed link (or similar) for it. Since there is also no "List:" operator in Twitter Search yet, you really have no way to see the stream output from a given list beyond clicking on those cumbersome "more" bars. Ugh...

3) There should be an option to add the output stream of a given list to one's "home" (or similar combined) stream (in effect a lists of lists). This would allow you to listen to a large number of of users almost instantly by simply selecting e.g. 6 lists on your favorite topic. You could then later still individually follow some or most of those users as you saw fit, or "mute" some by blocking.

(Oops, just tested this and it looks like your blocks so far don't filter out that user from a given List's stream. Let's hope Twitter adds this soon. This is still one of the most powerful features of FriendFeed: I can join a Group, similar to the new Twitter Lists, and if any users in that Group spam its stream repeatedly, blocking that user will remove them from my view of the Group's stream.)

And since there is no follow-spamming involved with lists (the users on the list never get informed that you followed the list they were on), there is really no reason for Twitter to put overly strict limitations on how many users you can follow this way. Why should you be prevented from listening to a large number (this is already what I've been doing on FriendFeed, where the follower/following ratio limitations don't exist)?

NOW, if you could then pipe an RSS output of such a home feed into FriendFeed to search over there, or at least could search by keyword over your own "home" stream, then you'd really have something useful.