The Problem with Twitter Lists

Recently Twitter released a new feature, "lists" and it seems like a great feature, especially for us to use here at Terroir.me. It basically replicates what we have been doing since the outset of the project, aggregating many like-minded Twitter accounts into 1 place and for that purpose it works perfectly. However, as a feature of Twitter.com it lacks so much of what makes Twitter a great product.

The Twitter Viral Loop

You see, Twitter has some really great user hooks that are so easily overlooked and underrated. It draws you in and as more people interact with you, the more you feel you can't live without it. This addictivity comes in the form of a viral loop. Someone follows you, you receive an email with a link to their profile page, perhaps you follow them back. Then you look at who else they are talking to and inspect their followers and followees and then you may follow a number of them, thus generating more emails and the cycle continues.

This self serving loop is important for a number of reasons, firstly it creates an opportunity to enhance your readership. Most people will follow you back if you follow them, so long as you are both tweet about similar things and although the Twitterati may shun this as a method of growing your followership, it works and they use it. Those emails prompt people to return the following favour, they are the Twitter lubricant which allows helps the links flow both directions.

Lists: No Loop

Lists however don't have this same feature. There is no way for a list to go into the world and announce themselves to the people they are following. I suppose a list curator could mention or DM each person they add to a list. Not really ideal though, considering how spammy that would appear.

This lack of self-marketing becomes apparent when you inspect the amount of list participation. Of the 17 lists I am a part of (Myachinghead's lists) there is a severe discrepancy between membership and readership. The ratio sits at 2750:166, nothing at all like my (fairly normal) 512:578 ratio of followees to followers.

Perhaps the solution isn't sending emails, an autogenerated direct message would suffice, though that itself generates an email or tapping into the mention stream would work. The point is, that without some sort of proactive notification lists will never take off.

Privacy Problems

While that is the largest problem and one which if solved would speed the uptake of lists there are other, slightly more insideous problems. It isn't immediately clear how to remove yourself from a list. The way of doing this it turns out is by blocking the list owner. Perhaps the thinking is that the owner of a list is responsible for it, but someone can click directly from my profile to see all lists I'm a member of (which as the first half of this post discussed I haven't been notified of.) I don't want people seeing that someone has added me to a list entitled "big fat hairy men" or worse nor do I necessarily want to have to block the person to remove myself. Just cause I don't like their selection of groups for me doesn't suggest I don't like what they say.

List Ownership

Finally, the ownership model of lists is flawed. By allowing only 1 person to curate a list they will never become truly authoritative. This is the problem with Squidoo lenses and Google knol, the information was never publicly editable and as such it quickly becomes irrelevant. This is clear when comparing Squidoo and Knol to Wikipedia.

Twitter doesn't need 27 lists of Melbourne Twitterers each with 2 followers, it needs 1 list with 1000 followers. This has been the power of WeFollow and presumably they will update the site to quickly use lists and become the defacto public Twitter lists. I know that's what we will be trying to do for wineries.