Launched to much fanfare towards at the end of October last year, the creation of new Twitter Lists and the use of existing ones seems to have ground to a halt from what we can see. Here are seven reasons and one sign that we think Lists are dying. First, of all…
Most Twitter users aren’t power users & don’t need Lists
Most people that use Twitter (and we’re talking most likely the vast majority) probably follow around 100 people, if that. When you only follow a small number of users, partitioning them out into Lists just seems to be a waste of time. Yes, Lists can be used to highlight experts in a field or put users into categories (lawyers, baseball players, etc.) but…
Following people in the main stream is easier than following a list
If you find someone that you find interesting, what is the first impulse – to put them in a List or simply to just follow them? Yes, Twitter.com has an “add to a List” button, but without having all of the numbers, we highly suspect that most people follow people first and then add certain people to a List later (if they remember to do so). That said, we also suspect…
Everyone that wanted Lists has all the Lists they need already
The people (read: power users; see above) that were screaming for some kind of list or group functionality in Twitter before Lists were launched now have built all the Lists they can think of. They’ve categorized as many people as they know/follow, and since…
People discovery is disabled on Twitter, so if you can’t find people, you can’t put them in a List
For whatever technical reasons involved, Twitter just doesn’t seem to want to turn on what in our minds is an essential service, without which, finding people on Twitter (especially the kind of people you’d want to add to a List such as “doctors”) is difficult, though of course not impossible. For example, you could find people through your main stream, find them through other people’s Lists (a good use of the function) or through Twitter search.
So those are some of the reasons why more Lists aren’t being made, but another problem with Lists is that functionality around Lists really hasn’t evolved, either from Twitter itself or from third-party developers. For instance…
Still no way to direct a tweet only at members of a List
Twitter is a messaging platform – what good does a List do a user if they can’t target messages to and from that List? There are spam issues involved of course, and also Twitter wants every tweet to just be out there in the wild (although there are private accounts, which has always been a great feature and commitment of Twitter). The only way you can really message a whole bunch people that have the same interest is if they are all following the same hashtag, and that is spotty communication at best. Another example of how Lists aren’t really being considered a major feature of Twitter is that…
All Twitter clients don’t support Lists
This means that if you switch to an otherwise rocking Twitter client that doesn’t support Lists, Lists then become dead to you. We expect this to continue, because developers understand that…
It was never really a good idea to start with
This is really the heart of the problem. Twitter was receiving a lot of requests to add groups to Twitter, with the assumption that it would be integrated into the core of the messaging service, perhaps as group DMs or something similar. However, that never happened, and since power users (especially those that simply follow too many people) were starved for some kind of organization of their Twitter accounts, when Lists came out there was a frenzy of list making that has since – again, from our observations – trickled down to a grinding halt. Seriously, if Lists were still taking off and people using them nearly as religiously as they interact with their main timelines, then we wouldn’t be seeing this major road sign pointing to Lists dying:
If Twitter Lists were going strong, Listorious would be evolving as an app, but it’s not
This is one of the strongest indicators to us that List usage has dropped off dramatically since the weeks following its launch. Highly publicized (especially by Twitter itself) site Listorious is today what it basically was in November last year. Unless the people behind the site simply don’t care about this business (and Sawhorse Media runs the popular Shorty Awards, so we’re assuming they’re not only legit business people but that they have a pretty good grasp of the pulse of Twitter), if Lists were even going a stable clip, Sawhorse probably could have gotten plenty of cash to built mobile apps, upgrade the site, etc, but since they basically haven’t done anything major, we can only assume Lists are dead on the vine.
I tend to agree. Set up the max number of lists early on (and wanted to set up more!), but found that using columns in TweetDeck was a MUCH better way to achieve my filtering goals.
Interesting article. I think the reason lists are languishing is that there are no good apps for managing them.
@raybeckerman
Agreed, but it’s a vicious circle – if the apps aren’t built people won’t use the features, and if people don’t use the features, app developers don’t want to waste their time. IMO, it is going to take some nudging by the Twitter folks to the developer community to build these apps if Twitter truly wants to keep this feature alive.
I don’t think Twitter has any cred with the developer community, in view of its recent unveiling of its new tactic of letting the developers do the heavy lifting, then stepping in and stealing their work.
Yep – I’m a Twitter “power user” *and* application developer and I don’t use lists!
It should been categories not lists.I use twitter as a liberary,a storage for info. and data,and i want to create categories to organize my tweets in them according to topics but i cant find the people who i suppose to send to my suggestion with that.If tweets are in categories according to topics its easier to go back to and people can read them each according to their interest.
Yes, this goes to the larger discussion of adding meta data to Twitter/tweets which is something many people want, and which perhaps Annotations will accomplish.
I’ll go farther: we created twlisted.com to make the canonical list of twitter list. We figured that listorous was too 90′s Yahoo so we went the google way of getting the world in one place for quick finds.
It’s superfabawesome and all that and people use it a lot. Once.
Our take is that lists are useful but are more like screen saver backgrounds – set and forget. Or change once a year. This is a nice feature for twitter to have, but it’s nothing that will make the ecology any money.
Anyone wanna buy a website?
I don’t think that Lists are dying. Yes, it’s not a feature basic users need. However, that doesn’t make it any less useful. I follow 4 lists (2 of my own and 2 curated by others). And I refer to my lists more often than my main twitter stream. In fact Lists have reduced my dependence on RSS feeds.
Excellent post! I’ve been feeling the same, but you’ve put it beautifully in words. Very clear and coherent.
Thanks for the kind words.
I’m not so sure. I really like Lists. The main reason is this: I’ve made lists for all official Google accounts, Tech news, News, Sports, Music etc etc.
If I would follow all those people I’ve put into the lists, my feed would become useless. So I put news and organizations etc into lists, that way I can keep up with what they’re posting, but it wont clutter my feed.
When I want to read some news, or keep up with what my favorite artists are posting, I just go to that list.
I hope that Twitter don’t delete the List feature.
Not only do I hope that Twitter doesn’t disable Lists (and frankly, I doubt they could without an uproar from power users) I wish they would WATER the thing to bring it back to life. It needs to be a much more robust feature – until it is, I think it will continue to whither.
Agreed, Chad. I continually change the names and members of my lists, but nine times out of ten they do not contain people I follow by stream. In fact, if I follow anyone by stream I “test them out” by list first. A vetting ground.
Excellent article and I agree with most points.
You’ve listed most of the problem with lists…
An additional problem is that they are abused. People are using them to “reward” other people, i.e. “if you include me on all your lists” “if you follow my list”, etc. There are also applications that automatically place people in lists, as well as people who use lists because they are indexed by Google – so they try to manipulate that.
The most important aspect should’ve been the group messaging, and that’s, sadly, not there. If this was there, everything would’ve looked different.
The abused and “I’ll pat your back if you pat mine” angle is a great point that I completely agree with, thanks Udi.
Abuse is one issue, yes. But the biggest issue of all is just that you cannot do anything further with a list other than build it (totally agree about the idiocy of Twitter not allowing bio-based keyword discovery BTW), and then read it:
1) The mass DM thing is probably too spammy, and of course cannot work since you can add people to lists that you aren’t even following or they you.
2) The reading of lists should have always had auto-load-next-page when scrolling to the bottom the way that Seesmic Web has implemented (which I don’t like to use for other reasons). So even reading them is not that smooth currently.
3) What is REALLY missing is per list search, or maybe even “track”. THAT would be truly useful for surfacing things from more targeted/filtered/relevant-for-the-subject sources.
All that said, I use lists daily and couldn’t do without them, but the minute e.g. Google Buzz
comes up with groups and better per group surfacing/filtering, that would probably be the end of that…
Using Lists is a great thing to do when someone has aggregated followers on a specific theme and you simply don’t want to go through the rigmarole of finding each member individually.
For example, I’m attending the Social Media Success Summit and someone has gone to the trouble of creating a List of all those attending. It would have taken me hours to follow all these peeps by any other route than subscribing to that List.
So I think it’ll stay as a usable feature. But then, I also use Google Wave… ;-)
Should I write a post like this for Wave too? I doubt it’s needed… ;-)
Methinks the twitterer protest too much?
I use lists for one major purpose — sorting folks out so I can listen to just a dedicated stream at a time — and that’s good enough for me. I don’t need them all the time (so using mobile apps sans lists isn’t a huge deal), but when I do, Tweetdeck handles lists just fine.
It doesn’t have to be used by everybody — heck, only “power users” seem to use twitter past more than a few tweets anyway — and group messaging goes against Twitter’s simplicity, but that’s what hashtags are for…
Yes, power users do make up a tremendous amount of Twitter’s traffic/tweets, so if they are using them and like them then it is good for Twitter’s bottom line. That said, I still think that NEW lists say over the last few months, are far and few between, which is why I think the feature needs a shot in the arm otherwise it’ll (maybe slowly, but eventually) die altogether as “so 2009″. ;-)
I don’t thinks lists are dying, but agree that not enough apps have been made to use and support them. I use lists in place of groups in tweetdeck because I can easily use them with peoplebrowsr, pluggio, seesmic, and the twitter web site. Lists made tweetdeck groups a portable item, something you could take with you as you tried different twitter clients to best suit your style. I can also make them public, and use other people’s lists, which you couldn’t do with tweetdeck groups. I follow about 1k people (does that make me a power user?) and wouldn’t be able to do so without lists. I can understand why someone following 10 people doesn’t need lists, but they are useful even if you are following “just” 50 (and you are really following those 50).
I’d love to be able to do many more things in a list and am just starting to write some apps that will do that. For example, sort lists by a variety of characteristics (alphabetic, # of followers, how long they’ve been tweeting, how long since I RT’ed them, etc.). I’d also like to do set operations on lists like union, intersect, difference. Those are just the start. However, for me these are spare time projects, so it will be a while.
Please ping us when your apps are ready, would be great to take a look!
Thank you all for your comments – right after I posted I went out for Mother’s Day brunch, so just back online now!
As a general comment to what a lot of you are saying, I don’t argue that Lists met a number of needs for a lot of people last year, it’s just that if it was a fully-thought-out feature that had a lot of utility, it would be on the rise not on a sharp decline.
I was at Chirp, so I got a pretty good idea of where Twitter wants the developer community to focus. Lists were conspicuously not on the agenda. So I’d say that unless lists somehow move the Twitter ecosystem towards Twitter’s priorities – “friction-free” and “relevant” – they’re a back-burner item.
Annotations are a big deal, and I think one of the reasons they’re a big deal is that one of their media partners – MSNBC – is interested in them to help “curate” tweets into news. Location is a big deal, because Twitter wants people to be able to tweet about places. @anywhere is a big deal because it allows any web site to interact with Twitter. Lists? I wouldn’t go so far as to say, “Meh”, but nobody said, “Hey, developers, why aren’t you building cool stuff with lists?” They *did* emphasize @anywhere, on the other hand.
Yep, that’s about what I heard too from people that were there. Annotations especially has a lot of promise if done right.
Chad – as a relative newbie had been wondering why Lists were there and why there were not more features to them – I guess this is answered here – however, for the time being they are useful to categorise and thus I have just added @thenextweb to a new list focused at those spreading the word about happening things in Social Media. Thanks.
Excellent use :-)
I agree with all the points you have mentioned Chad. However personally I follow my tweet stream with lists better.
I have different lists open as different columns in Seesmic web and more often than not see these columns first. The reason? I have them sorted by importance and incoming tweet rates. So it goes friends to news agencies, left to right.
It was lists that has made sure that, among the tech analysis and news and reports, I do not miss all the small little blabs from my friends.
You raise some valid concerns about Twitter Lists, but personally I’ve started using Twitter lists a lot more more since I switched to a Twitter client that allows me to see multiple columns of activity at once. I monitor at least two daily and others when the urge strikes.
Perhaps Twitter lists weren’t the killer app that some people hoped they might be, but they’re still useful to some of us.
But I love lists! New people are discovering Twitter all the time, and surely we welcome that? For them lists are a godsend. Twitter isn’t that useful until you can begin to see tweets from people talking about the stuff you’re interested in. And your own feed goes nowhere if there’s no-one to send it to. When I discovered lists Twitter suddenly made sense to me. It opened up a whole world of people tweeting about things I want to hear about. I’m really hoping lists are NOT dying on the vine!
A better (or for that matter any kind of) people search would accomplish this much, much better.
I am a proud twitter list newbie.
I come from a background of TV and magazines and I am thrilled by the potential of lists…the potential. Yes, the present is bumpy, but the future looks very bright.
Right now, my partner and I are thrashing about and getting Singaporeans to experience lists. We are a business in incubation mode. Challenge 1 ‘Twitter = what I had for lunch’ to the average user, at least in our experiences. And “with FB and websites and Linked In etc. why do I need another thing I will get spammed with?” Challenge 2 Building a list of super tweeters. With a global topic, there is a wealth of people to follow. Not here.In Singapore we have ‘volunteered’ to work with a handful of select companies to find ways to increase business. We help them write tweets, schedule, attract followers and more so that we can position them on lists, knowing that they are going to be continual sources of good content. Challenge 3 Publicity/Marketing…right now, ‘average’ people just don’t get lists….we know that educating them is our first step….Let’s hope that soon there is an “Ashton moment” for lists, something that will allow the average person to experience them as the most up to date and exciting sources of relevant focused info that they are…
(Warning: self-promotional plug) Our project is called steveneva..as mentioned we are chaotically thrashing about… but we are educating people, we have already experienced some small successes and we will soon have more dynamic clients that will turn our lists into minimagazines/galleries/guides.
In a month or so I will write a summary of all of our experiences. Lists are challenging at present, but once we hit a tipping point in Singapore, we think we will have a formula and marketing plan for a worldwide series of branded lists. In any event, we are learning a lot, having fun and making some noise for our customers.
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck the earth sensitive as iodine to light RWE, Resources. Twitter just doesn’t seem to want to turn on what in our minds is an essential service, without which, finding people on Twitter is difficult, though of course not impossible.
totally agreed…
Thanks for the useful information. Social Media has seen a tremendous growth in the last few years. Watch this amazing video on my blog to realize the real potential of Social Media Revolution.
There is one point you missed: private lists.
This is probably the area where lists are most useful:
Build a “My competition list” a “people who post funny stuff” the use for private lists is much larger than for public ones.
yes, would be interesting to see numbers on how many private lists there are. That said, I’ve talked to a lot of people in the past that don’t even know about private lists, so I’m thinking the vast majority of Lists are public.
Thanks for explaining to me why I never did anything with the things. The talk-to-a-list feature is critical. Also a listing should count as a follow, but who cares.
True…but I think as Twitter becomes even larger, they may find a second life. Christopher Renz The brpr Group
There are always new additions or changes that should be put into certain functions of websites. The growth rate of features is also bound to plateau just as the website’s growth has a limit, as there are only so many people on the planet with Internet access. There are two things that could boost the potential number of users for lists. First, more application integration is the key for any commonly used website tool. This is proven by Google, the people that expand to every application in every direction possible. Second, make it more user-friendly. Why wouldn’t Twitter add a lot of different methods for using lists? The more ways you can interact with lists, the more valuable they will become.
I follow about 100 people and dutifully took the time and made lists because people were talking about how useful they were. I have yet to find a single reason why this was worthwhile.
With all due respect, perhaps the people you follow are more interested in sharing lunch descriptions than useful information… Go to a twitter directory and find people who are generating useful information on the topic you’ve chosen. make a list. There are no guarantees in life, but that list will likely be of value to you.
Hi Chad,
Our firm has managed FB pages and Twitter accounts for major brands in the wine industry in California. We, as direct marketers integrating social networks as direct to consumer sales and marketing channels, have found Twitter lists very useful:
1. Segmentation: using purchase recency, frequency, monetary, Twitter Followers, Non Followers, FB “Likers”, Non FB Likers. . .
2. Follow to Followers Ratio: we use lists as a method to control the number of people-companies we follow in order to stay as close to a 1:1 ratio as possible. The goal is to avoid the perception of a spammer or affiliate marketer within the Twitter network.
3. Social Channels: we look for cross over from FB users who also have Twitter accounts, list them, and begin the process of opening communications.
For use at Innerarchitect.com the list feature has been nothing short of a test tube allowing us to make observations and conclusions. Thanks for your post!