Follow Friday: iPhone Twitter Lists and “New Style” Retweets Edition
We’ll save you the preamble this time; suffice it to say iPhone+Twitter = peanutbutter cuppy goodness. And now Twitter is rolling out new features to either make it dark chocolatey super good, or just to give us a sugar headache, we’re not sure which (though we’re fairly sure we’ve strained the confectionary metaphor well beyond the point of painful, so moving on…)
Twitter Lists aims to help with discovery — to let more users find more interesting people to read and follow. Basically, if you follow hundreds, thousands, or more, it was nigh-impossible to keep up with a few specific ones, or to organize them in any way (sort of like iPhone apps on the home screen, don’t get us started!). With lists, you can create groups/categories and add the people you’re following to those lists. Family, friends, co-workers, fellow gadget enthusiasts or movie geeks, pretty much any system you can think of. Then, to see what that list is up to, you just go to the handy list view and voila, all their tweets, nice and separate. You can also follow other people’s lists if you find a group you really like.
We’ve set up a few already:
- TiPb Staff, for all our editors, writers, reviewers, and moderators.
- SPE Network, for TiPb sibling sites and their Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, Palm, and Windows Mobile coverage.
- SPE Site Editors, for behind-the-scenese commentary and random thoughts from those who manage the above-mentioned sites.
- SPE Everybody, for the master-list of everyone involved with Smartphone Experts.
We’ll be adding more if/when they make sense, so if you have requests, send them our way!
New-style retweets is more controversial and potentially confusing. As Twitter rolls these out, when someone you follow retweets something, you no longer see them and their retweet, but the original tweeter, (even if you don’t follow them), along with a note saying which of the people you followed retweeted it. Again, it’s supposed to help with discovery, but it’s already driven Justine Batement into curse-riddled outrage, and depending on how it’s implemented on the web and in clients, could jut be a bad of Twitter hurt. (Techcrunch posted the above screenshot of how Tweetie 2.1 will be handling them, pink corners and all).
If you’ve tried them, let us know what you think, either in the comments below, or on Twitter:
@theiphoneblog, @reneritchie (Rene), @backlon (Dieter), @iChadman (Chad), @JFSikora (Jeremy), @jamesus (James), @llofte (Leanna), @JHamilton24 (Josh), @justin_horn (Justin), @msproductions (Matt), @skeetobite (Chris).
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Twitter has to keep trying new things to improve. I love Twitter, but it could be so much more. Right now its very difficult to follow a conversation between two other people. Say Rene is dropping some knowledge back and forth with someone on a subject you are interested in. How can you easily view this conversation?? As time goes on, Twitter will get better and more focused. Despite all the spam
The evangelists are hyping the beauty of Twitter lists. But tell ya what, until I can readily utilize them via mobile formats (c’mon Tweetie 2.1) – their goodness eludes me until I’m working from an immobile setup… Which NEVER (ok, rarely) happens… Am sure it takes time. The beauty of Twitter itself has been it’s immediacy, so the process of getting apps up to speed isn’t really terribly drawn out, it just feels that way.
Then again, it’s always easier to criticize that to create.
Sorry, I just don’t get following blogs on Twitter (or using Twitter at all).
The biggest mystery to me is why anyone would want to follow hundreds of people who post dozens of tweets and/or feeds per day (or per hour). I check this site every day. So why would I want to follow it on Twitter and have my screen filled with 30 TiPb feeds, as well as 30 Macword posts, 30 Engadget posts, etc., etc, only to leave me struggling to find what my real friends have said? Not to mention (what iphone4idiots said) about seeing dozens of partial conversation bits that make no sense to me because they’re in response to someone else.
Or you could just use TweetDeck as I have for the past several months and get the same thing.
@Fastlane:
The problem is actually worse than that.
Its not just that some blogs are slipping off the net into twitterland, but also twitter is now becoming the ONLY source of research for many blogs I follow.
There are some sites that have huge raging twitter floods about issues they no longer bother to post to the blog, and you only find out about them tangentially.
There are some computer hardware, investing, and automotive blogs that ONLY sift twitter feeds for stories. They miss more than half the real news about their focus area because they watch such a filtered subset of one-liners that they complete lose touch with their industry, ignoring press releases, direct emails, and breaking news items.
Maybe the re-tweets will help in this regard, but I doubt it.
Let us tweet with Echophon HERE!
I understand (I think) and like the concept of lists (kind of like RSS folders), but like a poster above said, I only read tweets on my iPhone, so until Twitterific adds folder support it really does me no good.