You may have missed the news on Thursday, but Twitter quietly announced that they have upgraded the list functionality. I know that from the feedback I get from courses, a lot of people don't know much about Twitter lists which is a shame, because they are an excellent way of racing through content. Basically a Twitter list allows you to - well - create lists of Twitter users. You can then view the newstream from each list separately from the full newstream. For example, on football match days I pull up the stream from the Everton Tweeters to keep up with what's happening in the game. If you use an account for work and hobby reasons you want a list for work and a list for hobbies, and maybe a list for close friends and family etc. Moreover, you can add people to lists that you're not actually following on a day to day basis, you can subscribe to other people's lists to see what they're doing, and you can see the lists that people have put you into. All in all, tremendously useful!
Twitter previously had a cap on lists - 20 lists, with a total of 500 in each. My UK librarians list therefore ran to a total of 3 lists, which was a real pain. Now however you can create up 1,000 lists on Twitter. Those lists can now include up to 5,000 accounts, which is far more sensible. However, what they haven't done, which is $%^&ing annoying is give you any way of easily merging lists. So to include all of my 1,200 UK librarians into one list I have to visit lists 2 & 3 and take them out of one list and put them in another, then delete the now unused list. That's a real pain. However, if you want to start following my Twitter list of UK Librarians, which is currently being updated it's at https://twitter.com/Philbradley/uk-librarians and you can follow it yourself if you want to. The advantage for you is that you can dip in and out to see what colleagues are saying, without adding them all to your own accounts, if you think that's going to be a bit daunting.
If you are still going 'uh?' I'll take you briefly through list creation. First of all, go to your Twitter account at Twitter (there are other ways of creating lists using different clients, but this is common to everyone) and log in. Click on the cog wheel, top right hand corner:
Click on lists (obviously!). That then gives you a dialogue box on the left, with a list of any lists you've created in the main body of the screen.
A bit like this:
Click on 'Create a list':
You can keep lists private, which is helpful in some situations. When you have created a list you'll see it appear in the list of lists (sigh, should have thought this terminology through more clearly shouldn't I!)
You can then add people to lists when you add them to your Twitter account. When looking at your list of followers, you'll see this:
And you can just click on the little person. You'll get a series of options:
Click on 'Add or remove from lists':
Up pops all your lists, and simply add them to the one(s) that you want - there's no limit to the number of lists you can add someone to.
You're now pretty much done. Just do that for all your other Twitter contacts and you're done. If you have a lot - save it for a rainy day, but start creating lists now and pop new folk into them; it's a bit of a drag, but it can save you a lot of time in the future.
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