Twitter lists: Adding to the noise or helping?
So everyone is finally being let in on the party that is Twitter lists. Instead of searching for Twitter users around a topic and looking at what they’re saying to decide whether to follow them directly, you can now follow a list and monitor a group of users curated by someone else.
Is this helpful in cutting through the noise? Or is it adding to it by creating yet another information stream to follow? I’m torn.
One way lists could help is creating a new metric for ranking the credibility of Twitter users. How many lists a person is on could be a more accurate representation of the value they’re adding to the Twitterverse. That may not hold for long as more users get access to lists and their numbers rapidly proliferate (and people simply add themselves to lots of lists just realized that Twitter doesn’t let you add yourself to your own lists, glad to see that).
Lists will make it easier for new Twitter users to quickly find conversations that interest them. Right now, all Twitter offers to new users is the much-maligned and mysterious Suggested User List (SUL). Evan Williams has already said that the new lists feature is intended to eventually replace the SUL.
The move could lead to all sorts of changes in how Twitter users act on the network, whether they merely watch lists for topics and follow only people who they actively engage with.
But now beyond watching the stream of people you’re following, there is yet another channel of information to follow. As of yet, Twitter lists have not been incorporated into many third-party clients, so you’re forced to go to the Web site to see them. The net result for now? Lists are yet more noise and add to information burden. I’m sure this is an issue that many developers are tackling (some like listorious.com are already doing it), and I eagerly await more innovation around lists.
Media Diet
Since this site will be about media consumption, I thought a good place to start would be talking about my information diet, and make that a regular feature. Maybe this will help you, and maybe you have advice to help me find meaning from noise. This way I can also track how my habits change.
I’m not in any way suggesting what I do is ideal. Part of why I started this site is that I feel the technology today has plenty of room to improve so it can simply get out of the way of communication. We should be able to do better, and we’re getting there.
- Wake up: First thing I usually do is grab my iPhone and check my email. Typically there are about 20-30 messages that have arrived overnight. Some is personal email, like from my fiancee in Tokyo. Most tends to be email newsletters that I have subscribed to, either news-related like The New York Times headline summary or Daily Beast, along with journalism-related e-mails from places like the Poynter Institute.
- I usually get on my shiny MacBook Pro laptop pretty soon after waking up. I might try and clean out some e-mails there that I just skimmed on my phone, send responses if needed or go to links that seemed interesting from the e-mails. I have tried to get my gmail inbox down to zero with limited success. It’s at 76 messages now, not so bad at all by my standards. When I hear alerts throughout the day for new items, I usually immediately check to see what arrived. I still feel that little rush from getting e-mail, the gratification that someone is contacting you. If I’m out and about, I can’t go long without pulling my iPhone out of my pocket to check for new messages.
- RSS is still a habit for me. I use NetNewsWire as a desktop application, which syncs to a Google Reader account. I have just over 50 feeds there, a mix of journalism, technology and entrepreneurship sites. Throughout the day, I hit the refresh button to see what new items have arrived. I skim the headlines and click to read whichever items seem useful or interesting.
One new RSS-aggregation gadget I have been trying out lately is FeedHub from mSpoke. You send in the list of your RSS feeds and it figures out which posts are most relevant to you. I’ve actually found that does a pretty good job and am thinking about dropping individual feeds. But then I’d have the feeling that I might miss something that I need to know (an issue that I intend to come back to). - Twitter is more of a sporadic thing. I follow too many people to really watch what they are doing (about 1,000), so at one point created a “watch” list on Tweetdeck to monitor those who seemed to have the most useful or interesting updates. But I kept falling behind. Now, I tend to use the very clean and simple Tweetie desktop application, and just dip into the stream when I have the time or inclination. I usually do find many links there that keep me jumping around the Web and forgetting where I began (yet another issue to get back to).
- As for my Web browser (now Firefox), I don’t go to pages in themselves. Almost all the links I go to are from referred from the above-mentioned sources or Google searches when I need specific information. I do not have a regular home page online or regular set of tabs that I open.
- IM is a constant for me when I am online. I use Adium to stay simultaneously logged on to all the major clients, AIM, Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, etc. It’s the main source of communication with my fiancee. It’s also one of the major ways that I communicate with friends both near and far, a habit acquired from years living overseas before cheap international calling was the norm. I find that people are often more open and intimate in this medium and have had some of my deepest conversations with people through IM.
I’m sure I’ve left something out, but this is just a start and also sparked some ideas for future posts.
