Twitter lists

Neville writes a post about Twitter lists, some new functionality recently released to users. An official blog post trailed it last month.

Neville’s quite positive about it, and indeed it may well work for a lot of people. My view is more… meh.

If you follow lots of people it’s true that it is hard to keep up with everything that is said. I follow just under 1,500 accounts and reading everything is impossible. So I don’t.

TweetDeck, my desktop Twitter client of choice, has had groups – the ability to track a group of twitterers in a single, separate stream – for ages, and I’ve never used it.

After all, Twitter isn’t email. You don’t have to read it all.

I’m happy to dip in and out of my Twitter stream as I have time, and as I have something to say.

Anything that is directly pointed for my attention – ie by including @davebriggs in the tweet – is already highlighted for me. Likewise with the issues I am interested in – I monitor various keywords for mentions of those.

But other than that, I’m comfortable with the fact that I’ll miss the occasional gem – but know that if it’s really good, I’ll pick up on it later, anyway. The thought of spending a load of time managing a bunch of extra lists doesn’t really do it for me, at all – just as I don’t tend to put feeds in folders in Google Reader.

I guess I’m happy to rely on serendipity over organisation.