Last Thursday night Twitter rolled out its new lists feature to all of its 45 million users and unless you’ve been under a rock or completely unplugged you’ve probably heard quite a few people weighing in on them.
Somehow I have the feeling that none of this would even be an issue if Twitter would have called their new feature a “filter” or “banana”. But since Twitter is run by some pretty smart people they probably put some thought into it and realized that people go whack-a-do over lists, so, here we are.
In the circle of people I follow there have been two pretty high profile soapboxes propped up on the list topic. Chris Brogan politely excused himself from the idea of using lists because he says, “people immediately started DM-ing me, telling me that they felt left out or even LESS important because they weren’t on any lists”.
Not to be outdone by Brogan’s lack of silence, Scoble wrote a post responding to Brogan’s post where he basically called Brogan too emo and gave virtually no reasons why he will be using lists.
Here’s the point, if you’re letting Brogan’s or Scoble’s personal opinion effect whether or not you use lists…you’re doing it wrong. Lists are just a tool to try and help make you more efficient, nothing more, nothing less. Twitter is about following people whom you feel might expose you to some idea, thought or subject you may have otherwise not been exposed to. If creating a list helps you to organize you’re stream and filter out the excess noise then create a list. If it doesn’t, don’t. It’s that simple.
Don’t get me wrong, Brogan and Scoble are both great at what they do and have a lot to offer and are definitely worth listening to. Just not on this subject. In that spirit I’ve created a new list you may want to check out here: twitter.com/jamespoling/peopletoignoreaboutlists.
Hope that clears things up a bit. Now can we please move on?
