Twitter lists emerged as a selective beta for users, presenting a highly anticipated feature for better organizing your Twitter experience. With Twitter lists you can group together users you are following into subcategories, and also offers a feed for each list.
With the introduction of Twitter lists, the service becomes more usable and may even entice people to reignite their interest in the popular site that has begun to lose some of its traction. But does the new Twitter lists feature hold a candle to the more established use of Facebook lists when it comes to organizing friends?
Both Twitter lists and Facebook lists give you an option to organize people in your respective network in order to more efficiently share content. On Facebook, you can categorize your friends based on whichever parameters you deem fit. You can have one group for your hometown, another for your college buddies, and yet another for coworkers and work-related acquaintances.
The purpose of grouping friends in this way on Facebook is to easily share specific content with a list. You may have photos from a house party you attended last weekend, but you do not want your coworkers to have access to this album. Select which list can see the photo album from the party and you are able to wield more control over the access others have to your content.
With Twitter lists, you are able to better control the content you access through Twitter as it is better organized according to the lists you have created. For instance, a Foodie list could contain all the Twitter users you are following that often tweet about food. Another list could contain users that are your actual, offline friends, who’s tweets you would like to keep track of for personal correspondence purposes.
In this way, the controllable aspects of content shared through Twitter lists is somewhat reversed from what you will find with Facebook lists. Remember that much of the content shared on Twitter is public and accessible to anyone, even if they do not have a Twitter account.
This differentiation is further emphasized by the fact that a Twitter list comes with its own feed. That means that you can further organize your Twitter content on a deeper level, especially if you incorporate various list feeds into your favorite RSS reader.
The concept surrounding the feed format for a given list is not foreign to Facebook, however. Your Facebook lists also have their own feed, though this is private and specific to your profile and organization therein. From your Facebook homepage you can filter through your feed content by clicking on a list, and this list is only accessible to you.
Twitter lists, on the other hand, can be subscribed to by other Twitter users, making them more public. The public access to Twitter lists also means that they can be used for purposes differently from Facebook lists. You can subscribe to a list created by another user, and subsequently follow all the users in that list. In another scenario, a Twitter list can be used for marketing purposes to a certain extent, as content specific to a given topic can be lumped into a given list.
These are all important points to remember when determining which social network will best suit your list needs. With both Facebook lists and Twitter lists, there is a focus on efficient access to content that you want to see. However, Facebook remains a fairly private network when it comes to such organizing of the data coming from your friends’ feeds, while Twitter lists can be used for a wider range of purposes.
While Twitter lists are still in beta and have a great deal of limitations and bugs to work through, the potential to create recommendations around Twitter lists is greater at this point than with Facebook lists. If you are looking for new users with which to interact around common interests, I would recommend giving Twitter lists a shot.
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