Why Twitter Lists are good for People Search
This week I was reading a great Mashable article by Liz Pullen @nwjerseyliz. The article was an FAQ on the new Twitter Lists feature. Twitter lists are essentially an easy way to group or categorise your followers – in effect enabling you to have multiple Twitter streams. Liz identified 3 potential applications of Twitter Lists:
1. Lists as a way of organising your followers – enables you to follow groups of people more easily. At the moment, I have lists on Socialmedia, Tech, Photographers and Microsoft. A quick glance at each list and I can see what is going on in that particular group of Twitter users. Very handy. Indeed Twitter clients like Seesmic and Brizzly already consume these lists – and Tweetdeck is not far behind. (Having seen the exchange between @scobleizer and Tweetdeck founder @iaindodsworth this week). So the concept of the Twitter sub-stream is with us to stay.
2. Lists as a form of recommendation – if you get listed by someone then that is a vote of confidence in you and the content you peddle – sorry, I meant Tweet. :-)
3. Lists as a way of measuring influence – the more lists you are on, contribute to your overall clout in the Twittersphere. It’s no longer just about number of followers (indeed if it ever was).
These are all excellent uses of the List feature – however, there is also another powerful application of them.
Up until now, the way people on Twitter are categorised are by the information provided in their bio. Bios generally tend to be short, and contain keywords – which help with people searches. However, in some cases a bio can contain no information or indeed someone’s bio could be obscure or humorous, and so doesn’t necessarily outline what the person tweets about.
The introduction of Twitter Lists then is a clever way of tagging Twitter users – clever because it doesn’t rely on the individual necessarily to do it* – as the Twitter community when creating lists, are effectively generating meaningful tags on people.
* Of course by a user creating lists themselves they are providing more meta-data about themselves. Just look at my lists again. Socialmedia, Tech, Photographers and Microsoft – tells people what my areas of interest are.
All of a sudden the People Search capabilities of Twitter have grown exponentially. Not only is there more meaningful keywords on Twitter users now – the number of lists a Twitter user is on, is an indicator of influence – or effectively people rank. People searches on Twitter can return more relevant people search results with this additional keyword data – and the additional data on rank.
Twitter Lists will proliferate, because firstly, it is in our nature to simplify and group the people we follow, and secondly the reputation element is enough of a carrot for people to create lists. The carrot being the possibility of a reciprocated addition to a List – or indeed the opportunity to gaining potentially more followers.
Twitter lists can be both public and private. But, the social nature of Twitter means most lists will be public. Public Lists are indexable links by Search Engines. I’m sure engineers at Twitter, Bing, Google and Yahoo are relishing this new source of people meta-data for people searches – or if they’re not they should be.
