Why Twitter Lists Don't Make Sense - November 5th, 2009

This week has been utterly ruined by the uproarious debut of Twitter’s new Lists feature, and if you can’t already tell — I don’t like them.

Here’s the issue with lists: They’re unnecessary. A Twitter list is nothing more than a group column in Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop. Only, these are meant to be public, and within hours of their open-beta launch, they’ve become nothing more than the newest Twitter-based popularity contest.

Obnoxious, Pretentious, and Over-Done.

It didn’t take long for Mashable’s own Pete Cashmore to begin publicly using lists to stroke his ego, and many more followed. Cashmore later made an appearance in a blog’s comment-section, and said he meant it to be tongue-in-cheek. The jury’s still out on that one.

Almost as obnoxious as the popularity contest, these lists have also brought about the absolutely pretentious over-use of the term curate. If I ever see the word curate in reference to lists again, I just may gouge my eyes out. These lists have managed to bring out the worst in people, and they’ve done it in record time. Conversely, they haven’t managed to do much more than that.

Or have they?

No, they really haven’t. But the media felt the need to put them to work anyway — in a transprent attempt to seem up-to-the-minute hip. Mashable was quick to report on the handful of major media outlets who used lists today while covering the Ft. Hood shootings. The New York Times has even gone as far as to dedicate a whole page to showcasing their über hip collection of lists. They’ve become so abhorrently trendy that somebody even made an app just for checking them. What’s really funny about that is that it’s nothing more than a utility that creates Google Alerts for lists, and doesn’t even update but once an hour at that. None of this makes a dent in the fact that a user can simply do it all on their own to begin with.

So what practical good are they?

I mentioned earlier that lists are really equivalent to simply making a group-column in a twitter-client. The opposite is also true; you can take a list and replace your twitter-client, by using pre-existing web-based interfaces like Tweet Grid.

(Click image for full-size)

Tweet Grid allows you to array a set of feeds to create a twitter-dashboard of sorts, but you get to choose what each feed contains. Now, say you get tired of Tweetdeck constantly missing tweets from folks you have in one of your group-columns. With Tweet Grid, you can take a list with all the people you keep in that group, and then make a feed just for that list. You can also log into your account and have separately configurable feeds for your DM’s, @replies, and any searches you can think of.

What’s the advantage of this? Well, aside from saving the system resources required to run any of the larger clients, you don’t use any API calls when watching a list. You use your API calls every time a client checks in with Twitter to see what your groups, messages, @replies and searches are up to. Sites like Tweet Grid don’t waste all your precious API calls just to keep track of lists or searches. Instead of using a client to see your @replies, why not just use a search for your @name?

None of this explains why Twitter would want to introduce lists in the first place. This single instance of lists becoming useful happens outside Twitter, on a completely different site, so why would Twitter go to all the trouble to begin with?

The Bottom Line

It’s obvious that Twitter’s looking to monetize. The only reason for the nearly simultaneous introduction of lists, as well as retweet support, is that they’re about to make a serious bid to get more use out of their worthless web interface. The more people that use the web interface, the more effective future ad-placement will be. Other than that, there really is no practical use for lists. Honestly, Tweetdeck just doesn’t use enough system resources for me to get rid of that kind of full-packaged functionality, and it’s done what lists do for several versions now. This is also the part where I mention the inevitability of Tweetdeck supporting lists in the form of dedicated columns. Seesmic already does.