BlogWorld Takeaways 1/5: Twitter Lists

I’ve decided to write a series of posts this week outlining some of my takeaways from Blogworld 2009. This is meant to recap my notes and document some of the conversations that I thought were most valuable at Blogworld New Media Expo in Las Vegas October 15th -17th.

While most of the sessions at Blogworld inspired me to *think*, there was one session in particular, led by Robert Scoble, that gave me a glimpse into Twitter’s crystal ball.

In the middle of a session dedicated to “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Social Media;” Scoble got sidetracked. Somehow the audience convinced him to pull up his ‘list-enabled’ Twitter account. ‘Lists’ are a new feature that Twitter is beta testing on selected accounts. I didn’t get the power of the lists feature by reading Mashable’s post; it took seeing the new feature in real life for me to clearly understand the value.

Robert was clearly excited.

He told us he spent the last 10 hours sorting the 5,000 people he follows into 20 separate lists, that people can then search and subscribe to. Moreover, lists are built right into Twitter’s platform. Users can clearly see how many lists they are included in, which acts as a credibility (or popularity) indicator for the entire community.

The theory goes, the more lists that link to you, the more credible and powerful your voice is.

One of the audience members in the session aptly pointed out in the Q&A that this new feature will completely replace groups. 3rd party apps like TweetDeck will simply support Twitter lists feature, and do away with groups altogether. This way your lists are completely in sync across mobile, web, and 3rd party apps.

Scoble predicted this will be the most significant change in Twitter since it’s inception 3 years ago. He predicts there will be a virtual land grab, and suggested user lists created by all of us will be the real estate we all get greedy for.

It’s time to start thinking about curating lists of influencers, if you haven’t already. Game on.



No Responses to “BlogWorld Takeaways 1/5: Twitter Lists”

1. Patrick O'Keefe says:

   October 25, 2009 at 10:50 am

   Thanks so much for coming to the “Social Media: The Bad and The Ugly” panel and for writing this post.

   I thought Scoble’s demo of Twitter Lists provided a nice side plot, if you will, for the panel. When he started to go into it, we had time to do it and still fully accomplish the goals of the panel, so I thought the quick demo provided value as it isn’t something that tons of people had access to (I still don’t).

   I’d love to hear your thoughts on the panel itself, as well.

   Thanks again,

   Patrick