This week Twitter rolled out "Lists" to a limited number of users.
Described in simple terms said lists are subsets of a user's "friends timeline" and live in his/her path on Twitter.
Scoble, Mashable and the rest of the Web 2.0 gazers had a communal Twitgasm, like they always do when Twitter rolls out something new. In almost perfect unison they fired their usual salvoes of badly considered metaphors from the surplus stock at trashBay.
Hardly a one of them who did not use the term „killer feature“.
So much for the hype.
I beg everybody's pardon, but contrary to the self-anointed High Priests of The Church of Mashup I am totally underwhelmed by "Lists".
Twitter, you see, has a modestly dressed nerdy sister, named Identica. A micro-blogging service based on the open-source software Laconica. This service has for quite a while now had a feature called "groups".
While Twitter lists and Identica groups are not directly comparable the latter have certain features that Twitter should seriously consider introducing into "Lists".
So where do Twitter lists fail?
Shortcoming 1
You cannot link "Lists" to any meta-data. Hence, as opposed to Identica's "groups", a new user on Twitter cannot search for lists by keyword or tag.
Shortcoming 2
There is no short-tag for mentioning lists in tweets. Again Identica's implementation wins hands down. There you can use the "bang tag" which tells the system to automatically convert the mention into a hyperlink pointing at the group's page where the user can read about the group and / or join it. It's as easy as prefixing the group's name with a bang like so !groupname
Even if Twitter would consider implementing such a scheme it would run into a problem caused by an unfortunate design decision.
Over on Identica the groupnames are in the global username namespace, which automatically puts a "unique" constraint on all groupnames. Twitter lists live in the individual user's namespace and uniqueness can only be guaranteed within this namespace jail. Therefor Twitter would have to jump through hoops in order to let users simply type !listname and have the system create a hyperlink pointing at a unique resource.
Once "Lists" will be rolled out to the great unwashed, how many instances of "my_favs", "myfavs" or permutations thereof will pop up within hours of the launch? All just one fragile subdirectory away from polluting Twitter's global namespace.
Shortcoming 3
Twitter lists are exclusive "by invitation only" one-way streets, while Identica's groups are open and inviting, i.e. inclusive. You don't follow groups, you join them. Groups thereby encourage interaction, a quality that Twitter lists lack badly.
Let us also not forget the "hidden meta-data&q uot;. "Lists" tell the observer that somebody thought that the people on said list were somehow "more equal" than the rest of the plebs on his/her "friends timeline", but not exactly why. Enter from stage right "perceived values" -- see below.
The membership list of a group on Identica tells you that those people share a clearly stated common interest and that they went to the trouble of finding that group and joining it. Simple, easy, grep-able.
Summary
Twitter "Lists" are not worth the hubub that Scoble et al make about them and they are most certainly not a "killer feature".
Twitter has quickly evolved into a marketplace of shallow vanities where "interaction" is not necessarily the name of the game. Hence it is to be feared that "most listed" or "listed by X" will soon become badges like "most followed". Utterly meaningless, but endowed with a to tally artificial perceived value driven by hype.
„Wow , I just got shortlisted by @Celebrity.“ Just wait and see -- those tweets will come.
In their current implementation "Lists" are not much more than a bandwidth-intensive wrapper around those mindless #FollowFriday tweets made up of chained @mentions without any meta-data. They also duplicate functionality already built into a number of desktop clients.
There's nothing here. Let's move on.
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