Robert Scoble has a great post about Twitter lists. First let me give my own take on this: there are at least two major dimensions here: Twitter lists cut down the noise and help you to create your own social filter to learn fast and efficiently about new developments in whatever subject you’re interested in. You can organize people, sites or blogs on Twitter in public or private lists or subscribe to lists others made – and you don’t have to actually “follow” all the people of those lists. Mashable has a great post on how to use lists.
I said “whatever subject you’re interested in” but in fact I meant “in whatever technology-related subject you’re interested in.” Even though Twitter is becoming more relevant for other subjects as well (such as finance, politics…), as yet one cannot say it really covers everything – depending on region, culture, language and subject matter the relevancy of Twitter varies from “crucial” to “negligible”.
The second dimension: like all new media formats, real time formats such as Twitter struggle to really get main stream adoption. Just as 3D virtual environments are absolutely not mainstream, Twitter is not mainstream either (even though compared to virtual environments it seems to advance far more rapidly into that direction). Twitter lists may seem to be a simple new feature, but in fact it can help people to actually put Twitter to use and to appreciate it. People will find more and more public Twitter lists embedded in sites and blogs, and realize it’s actually possible to filter out the noise. They will find that those lists help them to make sense of what is happening and that can play a role which can be fully compared to that of (rss) feed readers.
Scoble’s post is very insightful and he suggests some great public lists to follow. There are no specific virtual worlds lists mentioned in his post – please feel free to recommend some good vw-lists! A first search returned some promising results like http://twitter.com/virtualworlds/lists/memberships and http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=3263.
Scoble’s post also includes a video with the Seesmic-team – Seesmic being Scoble’s favorite Twitter client. It’s also my favorite client. Loic Le Meur, the founder of Seesmic, also organizes LeWeb (together with Geraldine Le Meur), a major internet conference in Paris. This year’s edition will take place on December 9 and 10 and MixedRealities will cover the event. The theme will be the real time web – and of course, the real time web is much more than Twitter. If one takes into account how Facebook made a shift in the Twitter direction and interesting developments such as Google Wave it becomes obvious that the next big internet thing is the real time web (combined with mobile). Of course, there is a Twitter list which helps you to follow the speakers: http://twitter.com/leweb/speakers,and here you have the announcement:
Roland Legrand