The Emerging Twitter List Arms Race

kim cluadio [2009-10-30 10:43 AM]

I love the new feature I actually just made a twitter account yesterday and its worth it. Good for your business and for any other things you would want people to catch up on. If they are following you cool and congrats to twitter.

ChrisFizik [2009-10-30 11:19 AM]

yeah, could see this coming from a mile away...

but what do you mean it's going to be difficult to game -- what's to stop every SEO idiot and social media jerk from creating massive lists of ppl..just so it shows that so and so is on 200 lists.

It will suffer the same problems as Follower counts and RTs. See the post Scobelizer wrote on it last week I think

http://scobleizer.posterous.com/twitter-lists-limitations-bugs-impact-and-bri

brian Suda [2009-10-30 11:21 AM]

If lists were an attempt to balance the signal to noise ratio it is a pretty formulaic response. Facebook did it a few years with GROUPS, now twitter does it with LISTS. Rather than address the problem of following hundreds of people you can't possibly read, the only solution they come-up with is, put them in a list and ignore them. The social pressure of unfollowing them is too great to deal with. Another solution is to move to a competing service and start your list fresh!

I do like the way you can name a list, you can see how people are effectively tagging you and how they think about your stream, but for a management tool, it's greatly over-rated.

There are some very smart folks working at twitter, I would have preferred any number of other solutions that don't focus on the pissing match of how many LISTS and I on, and ones that focused on the problem of too many tweets. A 30 minute MUTE button, filtering by keyword or hashtags. Or some sort of throttling of people who post every 10 minutes. (Or even a MORE button that let me see NOT just the next 20, but to the last tweet i saw.)

Lists might hold back the tide of noise for awhile, but it isn't a long term solution. In a few months we'll be back to were we started still searching for a real solution of how to deal with the pressure and sizes of our connections.

John E. Bredehoft [2009-10-30 12:12 PM]

While there certainly is the flattery component in lists, Mark Trapp has pointed out two potentially serious issues.

First, there's the possibility that someone could put you on a defamatory list (such as a "douche bag" list), and because you have no control over how you are placed on a list, there is nothing that you can do about it. It would be nice if Twitter gave you the power to "mini-block" your inclusion in a list.

Second, even being put on a "good" list has its own issues. Let's say that I'm a spammer who wants to target Government 2.0 people with a way to make money fast by becoming a social media expert. All I need to do is access Tim O'Reilly's targeted list and I have it made. Perhaps, however, this is just the price of being online.

John E. Bredehoft [2009-10-30 12:12 PM]

While there certainly is the flattery component in lists, Mark Trapp has pointed out two potentially serious issues.

First, there's the possibility that someone could put you on a defamatory list (such as a "douche bag" list), and because you have no control over how you are placed on a list, there is nothing that you can do about it. It would be nice if Twitter gave you the power to "mini-block" your inclusion in a list.

Second, even being put on a "good" list has its own issues. Let's say that I'm a spammer who wants to target Government 2.0 people with a way to make money fast by becoming a social media expert. All I need to do is access Tim O'Reilly's targeted list and I have it made. Perhaps, however, this is just the price of being online.

bowerbird [2009-10-30 12:22 PM]

i was gonna make fun of your shallow need for approval.

but hey, if this makes you feel good, then good for you... :+)

-bowerbird

Francois Wilhelmy [2009-10-30 02:06 PM]

@Brian : Most desktop clients have an option to see up to whichever last tweet you read. However I hardly see how that makes it less time consuming to go through hundred if not thousands of tweets.

Ajeet [2009-11-03 12:52 PM]

"Adding 'please' increases retweets by 12.3%!"

Just when I thought that Twitter was the most overhyped social "phenomenon," this only increases my incredulity (if that is a word :)

Jerry [2009-11-21 11:20 AM]

Twitter lists keeps adding new lists every time I log in. Twitter support does not respond. Getting tired of deleting lists I did not create. This feature sucks and needs to be stopped! :(