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I've been spending A LOT of time following the Shuttle mission, STS-129, this week, a good deal more than I have in recent memory.  I've always been a fan of the space program and NASA but that fandom received a shot in the arm this week thanks to NASA and their allowing about 100 twitter users to attend a tweetup for the launch. I found myself following the #nasatweetup hashtag as people were posting, videos, pictures, and any other media that would attempt to convey their amazing experiences.  What does any of this have to do with Twitter lists you ask? Well a good number of those who attended the tweetup were also self-identified "Space Tweeps" and the Space Tweep Society (which I myself have now joined) maintains a Twitter list of space tweeps.  These space tweeps cover the entire gambit of space enthusiasts from NASA employees to educators to just space geeks, like myself, and everything in between. I soon realized that there is a very lively conversation and community concerned about the future of space exploration and they've been hiding on Twitter this whole time ;-)  As a result I started following the space tweep list much more closely and I realized that my use of Twitter continues to evolve in the era of lists. However it also raised some questions that I don't really have any good answers to.

Today I've been playing with the Seesmic Web client which has implemented lists. I can honestly say it is the best implementation of lists I've seen anywhere to date. The primary reason being that it will auto-refresh the lists (none of the API limits normal clients have). It is also a pretty descent client on its own with the standard set of features you'd want, the traditional multi-column view, etc.  In the case of the space tweep list what I ended up with is an almost real-time stream of all the conversations occurring among members of the list.  It is actually a really neat effect, the best analogy to which I've been able to come up with is a chat room. However here's where the questions start.

It isn't really a chat room. In the pre-lists Twitter if I @reply someone I have some idea in the back of my mind somewhere that anyone can see that @reply if the go looking hard enough at my profile or possibly if they have a search running. However there is a bit of effort required to get at an @reply made by me to someone that you're not following, at least in the pre-lists paradigm. Enter lists, now anyone following the list can see any conversation occurring between any member of the list and any other member of the list.  Those conversations become much more public. I've found myself a few times over the last few days responding to conversations I've seen happen by on the list that I might have some input on or that might interest me, okay fine, but here's what's new, those conversations weren't addressed to me I saw them only by virtue of the fact that I happen to be monitoring the list in real-time. So the question then becomes is my behavior on the up and up? For me it is a bit murky. I think to best understand the gray area this represents using a real world comparison is helpful.

So as I started to think about this problem I started thinking about how this would work in the real world? Alright so let's say I am in a room with a couple hundred people. I'm meandering around the room but I myself am not engaged in any conversation.  As I meander I hear a conversation between two other people talking that piques my interest and I interject with my own two cents. I think in the real world this is liable to be met with a host of different reactions but there is certainly a decent chance that this real world behavior might be known as "butting in." 

So is monitoring a list of conversations and adding to it on Twitter butting in? Or simply participating in a global dialogue? Well certainly the argument can be made that the technology allows for this behavior and doesn't prevent it certainly an active list like the space tweeps list in my experience seems to actually encourage a conversation to take place. However the real world example also seems like it could apply as well. Then there's the matter of how many people follow a particular list, there seems to be some disparity so if people aren't following lists will the have the expectation that others are? Perhaps all of this will become a moot point once the tools expand and make this kind of following a list much more manageable. Do people follow lists now? Do do you do it? How do feel? Butting in or good dialogue?

If you have any thoughts on the matter @bethejustin, leave a comment, or e-mail me at the address to the right.

Many 1's and 0's have been delivered already on the topic of Twitter's latest feature known simply as "lists." Including some of the really great coverage by Mashable. However I will dare to dream that somewhere out there folks might be wondering what I think.  Credit must also go to a blog post by Sean Bonner where he makes a "Prediction about Twitter Lists," that post really opened my eyes with regards to how lists are going to be transformative, as we'll explore now.

First what exactly are Twitter lists? Well any of the above links will probably do a better job explaining them than I but the basic premise is that they allow you to create collections of other Twitter users.  Lists can be public, seen by any other user of Twitter, or private, see only by you.  In addition to creating your own lists (up to 20 I hear) you can also subscribe, or I guess follow is the right term, any other public list.  Okay this is handy and something many have wanted for a long time. However where it gets transformative, as I discovered from Sean's post above, is in the initially overlooked detail that you can put an account on a list without having to follow it.

Here's how that's changed my Twitter behavior. Essentially my new approach to lists can all be boiled down into the idea that I am trying to reserve my timeline for accounts that are actual people. These may not be people I know as in the case of a lot of tech journalists, celebs, etc. but the accounts still generally map to individuals, at least that's where I'm headed.  There are of course exceptions for things I really care about like @NASA and many A Cappella groups, but the bottom line is the bar for which accounts I allow into my timeline is much higher. I've moved accounts like brands (think @JetBlue or @VirginAmerica), news feeds (think Digg feeds, @CNN, local blogs, etc.) these accounts tend to posts frequently and clutter up the timeline resulting in me missing posts from people I actually care about. In addition I also follow lists of for example all the NASA astronauts that tweet or all the SpaceTweeps out there both of which are fun because I can get a lot of content without having to follow an additional 500 people.

Are lists in their current form perfect? Hardly but I firmly believe that they are a gigantic step in a positive direction for the future of Twitter. The next step is for clients like TweetDeck and Tweetie to add support for lists however this will be on easy task. The first road bump is that to pull down the updates to a list via an app requires a hefty price be paid in the form of API calls. API calls are essentially the language these apps use to talk with Twitter. Currently Twitter allows 100 conversations to take place within an hour. This limit has worked well until down but let's say you have 14 or so lists each time you load them that's an API hit. The one client that has implemented lists, Seesmic, only supports manual updates of lists.  I would like to think that at some point Twitter will remove or raise this limit with enough capacity. Hopefully they realize that it does little if anything to fight spam at this point. I have some thoughts on an approach to spam but that might be another post.

The other issue is what exactly is the UI that actually makes lists useful and easy to deal with? Seesmic's is certainly one approach and I feel like it's the one that you might expect and it is reasonable enough. TweetDeck is holding their cards close to the vest promising that they have something up their sleeves in terms of lists but not saying much more.  It is clear to me that the purely column approach breaks down when trying to follow multiple lists. I would like to see some UI work in TweetDeck in terms of how you switch between columns the horizontal scroll that currently exists is a bit sloppy in my opinion. Regardless I am eager to see what TweetDeck comes up with. On the mobile side of things I think Tweetie has an easier time because in my mind the hierarchical nature of the iPhone UI makes sense one panel with a list of the users lists, tapping one loads that list, seems fairly obvious but then again @atebits does have a knack for some pretty creative UI design so another development that will be fun to watch!