Twitter Lists: group friends and see tweets only from those people

Tweeting from Twitter.com is not as feature-rich or easy compared to third-party programs like Seesmic, Tweetdeck, and Twirhl. But Twitter has finally taken a lesson from these programs and implemented a feature many users will enjoy: no, there’s no automatic retweet button yet, but there are Lists.

“Twitter Lists” is a beta feature that allows users to create Lists of people that they follow for different reasons. It’s basically assigning your friends to groups so you can choose to only see tweets from people that fit a certain label. I follow 371 people at the moment. About 100 are techies, 50 have musical opinions similar to mine, and the rest are an overlap of funny folks, sports fans, and news sources. “Lists” allows me to group these people according to subject and focus only the topic of the moment: tech, sports, music, etc.

My tweets on Saturdays are more relaxed, humorous, and centered on music or sports. I’m really not that interested in the gadget talk many of my Twitter friends engage in on the weekend. Creating a “Saturday” list will allow me to trim those users and focus more on people complaining about Liverpool FC and discussing the new Drake record.

Twitter is rolling out Lists in beta so it’s not open to all users. There will come a time when you log-in and see a notification of your inclusion, so here’s how to set-up a list once you’re granted access:

1. Click “Create a new list” and enter a name for your list.
2. Select whether you want to make the list private or public. Making a list public allows others to view and subscribe to your list. (I’ll probably never do a Follow Friday again once more people are able to use this function).
3. There are two ways to add people to a list: search for a username/subject or go to your follower’s list and add manually. Searching may return names of people you don’t follow, but it can be a valuable step if you follow people with a similar name/subject. (For instance, I follow lots of Android folks, so it makes sense to search for Android)
4. You should notice a small management button that looks like this:
5. Click the List button and select the Label you want to apply to that person. A username can be linked to multiple lists.
6. Rinse and repeat until you are satisfied with the list. If you don’t want to use the search function, go to your following list and look for the List management button. You can then click on a label and see only the people assigned to your list.