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?
It’s no secret that WordPress has pretty well established itself as a preeminent Open Source blogging/CMS platform. It’s a distant memory when WordPress could be described as just another blogging tool. I use WordPress on all of my sites and almost always recommend clients give a try. Some are reluctant but most of them are very pleased with the results and how easy WordPress makes it to maintain such a robust site.
2009 will be the year that the scales tipped in favor of social media. We just watched as a man brilliantly used social media to launch himself to the Presidency of the United States. 
