What Twitter Should Do With Lists

Last year, Twitter came up with the idea of Lists as a way of letting people group other people into categories. Or (as I liked to call them), boxes of people. With lists, users can create multiple streams of information, depending on who they’ve put in the list. A list of “Web Designers” for example, would only show the updates from the accounts that have been added to that list.

At any rate, I’m going to assume that if you use Twitter, you already know what lists are. There’s been a fair amount of feedback and opinion on the subject already, some of it not very positive.  I speculate that the animosity toward lists is due to the fact that normal usage of Twitter (without lists) is a two-way system of both in-bound and out-bound information. A user posts a status update for their followers, and that user also receives a linear stream of updates from people they follow.

Lists, on the other hand, are purely a series of in-bound streams. And the amount of lists you have adds layers to the amount of information that needs to be managed at any given time.

An Idea

I was considering recently how Twitter has no flexibility when it comes to who sees your status updates. You post, and it just goes out arbitrarily to everyone. Granted, you can limit this by setting your account to private or not through the preferences, but I don’t think of that as the same thing.

My thoughts were, and I’m almost ashamed to admit it, inspired from what Facebook does: to allow each status update to have a unique privacy setting. Or better yet, a way of sending updates to specific groups of people that already follow your stream. Facebook however, sorts by circles of privacy/proximity. I’d rather see it done with a more categorical system of sorting by interest.

To be able to send status updates to lists that you have created. Thus, only people who are within that list AND who happen to follow you, will see that update. Nobody else will see that you’ve even typed a thing.

Caveats: I believe that it’s important to qualify that someone has to follow you AND be in the list that you’ve targeted before they see it. Otherwise, you could suddenly see a surge of information in your stream from spammers adding you to THEIR lists. Extremely undesirable, I think. Also, it would be silly to create a list of people who don’t follow you. For obvious reasons. A warning could occur in the UI if this should happen (and should be easy to track and manage).

An Example

Let’s say that @jcroft is interested in both karaoke and partying it up at sxsw (which I know he is). He could create two lists for each of those, both full of people that he knows are interested in such things. Then, when he feels like tweeting about it, he could type something like “Hey %sxsw-peeps and %karaoke-peeps, did you hear that guy honking last night on 6th?”

Now, I have no idea if Jeff would type that or not, but the point is that only the people in those lists (at least those who follow him within those two lists) would see that tweet. Since the rest of us aren’t involved in the context, we don’t need to see it.

Less Noise

As Twitter grows, it’s inevitable that everybody’s streams are going to get harder to manage and keep up with. More users equals more updates. And more updates means more noise. Being able to see everything that’s posted will start to become a nightmare unless we are provided with easier ways of filtering that information - not just in-bound, like with lists, but out-bound. A way of trimming our own noise before it hits everybody’s timeline.

Feedback.

I’m certain that the idea isn’t without its flaws, it’s just something I wanted to throw out to the public and see what sort of a reaction I would get. Perhaps somebody from Twitter will read this and offer a sound response on this idea. Either way, there it is.