Twitter just announced a major new feature soon to launch: the ability to create sharable lists of users around topics of interest. This will tackle several problems with one feature: the ability to discover diverse high-quality users quickly and easily and the undue power Twitter HQ has had as the only curator of lists on the site so far.
Curation of dynamic topical expert sources is an act of poetry. Just like Twitter has caught on faster than RSS, Twitter Lists will probably catch on a lot faster than OPML has. If you’ve seen the new service TweepML then you’ve got the idea. This is going to be a very big deal.
“For example,” Nick Kallen writes on the company blog, “you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense.”
Twitter says that the lists won’t just live on the site, either; there will also be a Lists API available to outside developers. That could mean that clients like Tweetdeck, Tweetie and Seesmic will no longer have any excuse to keep your group lists locked-in.
There is some question whether having Twitter control this technology, instead of an outside, standards-based body like TweepML is trying to be, is going to be a good thing. We’ll have to see how they implement the feature and the API.
The possibilities here are endless, hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for this feature to go live.
Speaking of TweepML, you can follow all the writers of ReadWriteWeb via this link.
