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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!

A few months back I wrote a post about how I really couldn't find a Twitter client that I loved.  At the time I was using a solution that involved the Site-Specific-Browser Fluid and the Twitter web page and more recently had moved to Twhirl as my primary client.  In recent days I've been doing some testing on a new Mac native client known as Nambu and giving quite a bit of thought to the different philosophies of Twitter client UI design.  When it comes to the UI of desktop clients what you essentially end up with are three primary philosophies or styles.  The single column or "heads-up" as an example of this think of Twitterific or Twhirl.  Next you have the "outline view" a good example of this is the primary window of Eventbox on the Mac.  Last but by no means least, in fact it could be the most prevalent, is the "multi-column" examples of multi-column abound in Tweetdeck, the new Seesmic Desktop, and Nambu as well.  You also of course end up with varying combinations of these and interestingly enough Nambu implements them all. 

I've always kind of despised the mutli-column approach because it takes up so much desktop real estate but I decided to just face the facts of my all out addiction and dedicate a virtual desktop to Twitter (point: OSX). As I mentioned I've been using a new client, Nambu, for the last few days but it is certainly a rising start on the Mac.  By far Nambu's best feature for a Mac user is that it is a 100% native application AIR need not apply here. This in turn means that it can also take advantage of Growl for notifications, which AIR currently can't. There are a bunch of small tweaks I wouldn't mind seeing but for the most part they are all planned features so I look forward to seeing what's in store for future versions.  Another feature worth noting is groups.  Groups allow you to create your own groups of those you follow so for example I have a group called "Friends" with everyone I know in real life and I can quickly see just their updates.  This feature is one I've been feeling an increasing need for lately as my following count seems to always be creeping up.  Also while not a huge thing Nambu will also do @reply username completion which is a little thing but it always makes me happy and can be pretty useful. In addition with Nambu I've also started using the multi-column layout and I have to say it is growing on me it's nice to be able to see multiple streams quickly at a glance without having to click around between them, which is particularly nice when you just want to check in on a search quickly. It's also worth noting that Nambu also has an iPhone client in the works as well and while I wouldn't say it has complete feature parity with Nambu on the desktop or approaches Tweetie it is a good start.  Perhaps the biggest feature I'd LOVE to see is syncing between Nambu desktop and Nambu on the iPhone particularly friend groups and saved search terms...here's hoping. 

I'll continue to follow Nambu and now I am seeing indications that a Mac version of Tweetie is on the way, if history is any indication look for a blog post on it sometime after I've had a chance to play with it, after all I did say a little while ago that I would really like to see a version of Tweetie for the Mac so.

My Idea for an new approach to an iPhone Twitter UI:

As I started playing around with multi-column I got to wondering about why no one has implemented a similar approach in an iPhone client? How would multi-column work on the iPhone you ask? Well you would have your standard list view of tweets vertically as you do in almost all clients right now but you would also be able to swipe left or right to see additional columns or tabs or whatever.  The key though is that you can just swipe back and forth.  Want to do a new search? Swipe over form the last tab and you'll be presented with a search box.  I'm not entirely sure how the UI for choosing which pages to view would work perhaps some kind of settings UI I don't know. I think it would be able to flick between searches, friend groups, home, replies, etc. This approach seems like it would be a natural fit on the iPhone, well at least to me.