Update 2: It appears that Twitter is widely rolling out the “Lists” feature now.
Update: On the Twitter Status Blog, the company announced that it has expanded the availability of the “Lists” feature to 5% of its users. The company also says it will work its way up to a full rollout in the coming weeks.
Original Article: Twitter is testing a new feature, called Lists, with a small subset of users. The feature is designed to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. In other words, you will be able to group together certain accounts you follow, making Twitter much more useful.
“For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense,” says Nick Kallen, who is the project lead on the feature.
Twitter says lists are public by default, but they can be made private. The lists you’ve created are linked from your profile. That means you can find interesting lists that others have created. This should prove to be a good way to find new people of interest. You can subscribe to other people’s lists and others can subscribe to yours.
“We started working on this feature because of the frequent requests we received from people who were looking for a better way to organize information on Twitter,” says Kallen.
Twitter will make the feature available not only on Twitter.com, but will include a lists API. The company says more information about this will come out in a few days. It should be noted that some third-party apps already have the capability of grouping Twitter accounts. The public user-subscription feature is an interesting twist though.
The feature should go a long way for reducing the “noise” that is commonly associated with Twitter use. When you can break tweets down into separate categories, Twitter is much easier to enjoy.
There has been no date given for when the feature will launch for all accounts. Twitter just says it will be available once they’ve finished testing.
