MacMost Now 498: Twitter Lists

Learn how to use Twitter lists to organize your Twitter home page. You can group together people you follow by category and view only that list. You can also see which lists others have created and follow a list that fits a topic you are interested in.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary at MacMost Now, on today's episode let's look at Twitter lists.
So if you're like me you've found so many interesting people to follow on Twitter that it's hard to keep track of everyone's posts. Well, one way to organize it is to create Twitter lists, just groups of people that you follow and you can just see that group's posts at one time.
Let's take a look. So here I am on my Twitter account, and I can see one of the tabs up at the top here is the lists. Click on that and I can see that I have three lists that I've created. And when I select one, say, the Apple list here, it will show me only the tweets made by people that are in that list.
So to create a new list, I can go to lists here, and click on create a list. I can then enter a name for the list, a description if I want, and I can choose to make it public or private. Of course, private ones can only be used by me. And they can be handy for making say, a small subgroup of just your friends and you don't want other people to see your list or use your list. Public lists though, can be used by other people, so you can create one based around a topic, say, and then have other people find that list on your page and decide to follow that list as well.
Adding someone to a list is pretty easy, all you do is you find a tweet by them, or you go to their Twitter page. Let's go to this tweet here by my friend John, and I can click here on his name and see stuff here on the right, and one of the things I can do here is click on the menu here, and you can see I get a list of lists, and here's my three lists here, and I can simply check off one of them, and he'll now be a part of that list.
You can view more information about your list by simply clicking on the lists tab here and clicking on lists by you, then list them all here, you can delete one of them, you can also choose to edit information about one of your lists there.
You can also choose to look at other people's lists. For instance I can click on my friend Jay's account right there, and I can look at his lists by clicking on the tab right there. Can see which lists he has created and which lists he follows, you can see that he's got several that he's got listed there and several that he follows as well. I can click on those lists then go deeper into it and see the information about that list. 
So you can create lists for yourself to follow, you can also create lists around a topic and curate that list and have other people follow it as well. So you can see here that I can go back to my Apple list that I've created, and there's a view list page here, that gives you a shorter URL, you can actually get rid of the #! even, and just give people a direct link to say Rosenz/Apple.
If I go back to filmmakers for instance, I can click on follow this list and then I'll see all the tweets by the 396 filmmakers here in my Twitter stream. I can also return to this page anytime I want and unfollow the list.
So basically Twitter lists make Twitter a lot more useful if you want to follow a lot of people. You can divide people up into different categories, and take a look at the different topics by using your lists. You can also quickly follow a whole bunch of people around one topic by finding a list and following it.
So I hope you liked this look at Twitter lists, keep in mind that the Twitter web interface and the interface of various different apps and applications that you use to follow Twitter can change all the time, so the way that you might follow lists and create lists is going to change slightly but the basic idea remains the same.
Until next time, this is Gary at MacMost Now.

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 498: Twitter Lists”

forkboy1965

13 years ago

Such great timing. I had just noticed the List feature the other day and wondered what it was about. It's clearly something to which I wish to avail myself. Thanks for the quick reference material.

Odd.... followed your great directions, but after creating the List and populating it with contacts, it did not appear in the drop down list under Lists. Confused, I opened Tweetdeck which does show the List.

Signed out of the website version, signed back in, and there it was. Weird.

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