Enjoy Twitter, but have trouble wading through the deluge of updates from the hundreds of people you follow? In order to help you break down your Twitter consumption into bite-size pieces, the social networking site has begun rolling out its latest feature, Lists, to its user base at large.
Previously in testing for a limited number of users, Lists has begun rolling out to larger and larger chunks of the Twitter community.
The basic idea behind the feature is that it lets you group the people you're following into arbitrary lists. (Ah! I see where they came up with the name!) Then, if you only want to read updates from a certain subset of those people–say the news feeds you follow, or the staff of a certain publication–you just click on the list in question and you're presented with just tweets from those people.
Lists can be either private or public, which allows others to view your list and even subscribe to those tweets without having to subscribe to the individual users. That means you can have a private “Family” list, for example, and a public “Celebrities” list–but don't cross the streams!
Right now, adding people to lists is somewhat of a time-consuming process, requiring you to either search for individual users to add to it, skim through the list of people you're following, or add people from their own Twitter page. Likewise, the list functionality sometimes feels a bit bolted on; it's not fully pervasive yet, but that will probably come with time.
At the moment, no third-party clients support Lists, but we're sure they're working on it. This does, after all, mark one of the first major feature changes in Twitter since the service's inception. As for those of you who use Twitter, what do you think about Lists? Have you created any? Who are you following?
