Twitter Lists have rolled out to a majority of users on the site now and the uptake has been remarkable. Things will get truly interesting when lists can by turned into columns in 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic (one small client says it’s shipped list support already and Tweetdeck says it’s coming soon), when you can share items with particular lists exclusively (like you can on Facebook) and when you can search inside particular lists. Anyone who’s worked with OPML files before is likely to find Twitter lists frustrating so far.
Let’s operate under the assumption that Twitter’s own implementation of lists will be overshadowed by more useful implementations of the lists API. In order to help you get ready for that future, here are ten lists we think particularly worth following.
Twitter Lists are exciting because curation of dynamic sources is exciting. This is a particularly accessible way to do what syndication geeks have been thrilled by for years.
Here are some of our favorite curated lists we’ve found so far. We offer some description of these lists based on what we know about their creators and the short titles the lists have been given. The fact that Twitter doesn’t offer a field to describe lists makes me wonder who they talked to when building the feature. (Turns out this is coming next week.) A lot of things make me wonder that, in fact.
We’ve said before that groups are the secret weapon of the social web and we’re excited to see this feature go live. Hopefully it will become more awesome with time.
Here are 10 cool lists we suggest you follow. We found most of these lists by thinking of awesome people on Twitter, then seeing what lists they are on.
- Patrick LaForge’s “Linkers”
LaForge is an Editor at the New York Times and finds great links to share all the time. These are some of the people he finds them from. - Josh Elman’s Awesome Social
Josh Elman recently jumped ship from working at Facebook to working at Twitter. Silicon Valley super-geeks took notice, because Elman is a smart and connected guy. Here’s a nice big list of people he created that you should know if you’re interested in the social web. - Robert Scoble’s Founders
You want to see curation taken seriously? Watch Robert Scoble, any day of the week. Scoble has built out more great lists than you can shake a stick at and this one is a favorite of ours. It’s a list of company founders on Twitter. Strange beasts, these are, but good to pay attention to. - Rebecca Leaman’s Nonprofit Geeks
Rebecca Leaman works at WildApricot and she’s created a great list of geeks focused on social good, nonprofit tech folks. These people should be on your radar. - Chris Grayson’s Augmented Reality Peeps
We like Augmented Reality and so does Chris Grayson, a New York City mobile marketing consultant. He’s put together a nice long list of people working in AR. If you get to know these people now, you’ll probably be glad you did later. - Mike Taylor’s XMPP List
Mike Taylor, also known as Bear, does XMPP work at Seesmic. His XMPP list is a nice collection of real-time web developers, without bandwagon-jumping marketing types. Looking for early hints about where the real-time web is going? This list is one place we’re watching. - Raven Zachary’s iPhone List
Raven Zachary is the founder of Small Society, an absurdly hot iPhone dev shop in Portland, Oregon. Raven is curating a giant list of all the people working on the iPhone that he can find. We’d love to see his list of just must-read iPhone folks, but this list is pretty cool too. - Christina Braden’s Disability List
Christina Braden goes by the handle @advocate4all and her bio reads: “There will never be justice in the world until those who are not harmed are as indignant as those who are.” Hell, yeah. If you want to read biting, insightful critiques of social injustices, a list of disability rights activists is a great place to find them. - Ben Turner’s Anthropology List
Ben Turner is a renaissance man with a pretentious Twitter handle (@xeus) but his Anthropology list is an awesome collection of people studying digital culture. - The ReadWriteWeb Team List
Charming, intelligent, attractive and humble – the ReadWriteWeb team is a great source of news and analysis about bleeding edge trends and developments online. We’d love it if you’d follow us on Twitter and engage with us in conversation.
Those are some of our favorite lists. Have you spotted (or built) any red-hot lists we should be sure to know about as well? Let us know in comments. Listorious is a directory of lists, but isn’t it more fun to see lists of lists from people you know and trust? Both have their place – hopefully this is just the beginning of a new period of Twitter fun.