Twitter has upped the ante by adding a new Twitter Lists feature in their new site layout which allows users to join or create lists in order to keep tabs on large groups of people without having to follow all of them.
The Twitter Lists feature is also a new way to organize the people you're following on Twitter, or find new people, according to Mashable. Overall, the Twitter Lists is the long awaited "groups" feature.
According to Mashable, the Lists aren't just static listings of users, but rather curated Twitter streams of the latest tweets from a specified set of users.
When you follow a Twitter List, you're not actually following every user on the list, but following the entire list, meaning those users' tweets aren't added to your main stream.
In other words, you can create a list that groups together people for whatever reason (the members of your family, for example), and then you can get a snapshot of the things those users are saying by viewing that list's page, which includes a complete tweet stream for everyone on the list, Mashable reported.
The Lists allow you to organize the people you're following into groups, and they even allow you to include people you're not following, according to Mashable. With the new feature you can organize your tweeps into groups based on anything you want.
Users will also be able to recommend tweeps which is one of the other intended purposes of Twitter Lists, according to Mashable. Users can create a public list of people you think other Twitter users should follow, then anyone else can visit that list and follow the people on it, or follow the list itself.
When users begin to follow a list, it will show up in the "Lists" section in the right-hand navigation of Twitter, Mashable reported. Following lists is a great way to keep tabs on tweets from a large group of people without needing to add those people's tweets to your main stream.
Users can see the public lists others have created, and Lists they are following, when they visit their Twitter page, too.
By viewing all of the lists others appear on, and by checking out the lists that your friends have created, follow, or appear on, users can easily find lists they might be interested in, according to Mashable.
There are other ways to find about lists through third party sites, as well.
Listorious is a third-party site that maintains a categorized directory of Twitter lists, Mashable reported. You can search or browse through lists by category, and find the most popular lists.
TweetMeme is another site which exposes the most tweeted links on Twitter, according to Mashable. And just like it does for links, TweetMeme also finds the most tweeted about Twitter Lists.
