Twitter Lists: Missing Magic Musings
I wrote a post a few weeks ago entitled “Twitter Lists aka $100mm to Copy Blogrolls” where I detailed the folly and promise of Twitter Lists - glorified blogrolls/OPML but a step in the right direction if combined with other tools like search.
Friend and founder of TGroups/TLists, @jonathanglick, asked me to blog about my Tweet stating that Twitter Lists were overpromised and underdelivered. In all fairness, upon further consideration post Lists launch, it seemed that the community had higher expectations than what was delivered, which in many ways, is worse.
Though people’s issues with the lackluster list-building/management tools and total lack of list discovery are well documented, my beef stems from Twitter and lists supporters conflating the aggregating of Tweet sources with the curating of quality Tweets. They are not the same. Building Twitter Lists is curating in as much as my stacking a New York Times, a Wall Street Journal, and The Economist on top of each other is - these are selected grouped sources not selected grouped atomic information. This is why blogrolls/OPML didn’t “mainstream” RSS as it only aided portability of sources, not discovery**.
If I’m looking for gold nuggets contained within mountains, don’t hand me tools to aggregate more mountains and call that a useful discovery tool! Hand me a sieve already dammit!
The audience wants a filter framework. Twitter lists is not that framework.
But it could be a step toward creating one. The trick is for Twitter to adopt orthogonality with respect to search and lists, meaning that not only should one be able to use search against a list (including followers/following/favorites or a list of lists), but also be able to build a list of users from the results of a Twitter search. So how do you make aggregation useful? By using aggregation to set the universe from which you wish to extract context and atomic content, while also leveraging context to make aggregation or list building dynamic. Somebody needs to introduce Ev, Biz and Jack to Google Customized Search Engine, yesterday, as Twitter Search is so far behind the curve.
This is where Facebook NewsFeed and especially Tumblr Search-by-Popularity are well ahead of Twitter - frictionless approval via social gesture “likes” while using the aggregate behavior metrics as a search overlay to encourage discovery. The average FB or Tumblr user has tons of likes, thus establishing a taste-matrix which can be used for future personal and collective discovery. Neither Tumblr nor FB has done this, but it would behoove them to push access into their APIs and let the community develop around it. Empower those with domain expertise to develop their cultural relevancy and discovery tools on your platform.
As an aside, there’s a reason why Twitter favorites hasn’t seen much adoption (outside of Robert Scoble - he is a favoriting machine and may know something you don’t). The naming and execution are awful, it doesn’t aid discovery or aggregation, and it doesn’t overlay into search. Twitter should rebrand “favorites”, a mnemonic device for future retrieval, as “likes”, a social gesture rewarding the author and promoting taste.*** Align the incentive to discover more with the behavior of “likes”.
The magic combination for Twitter discovery is aggregation, search, “likes” and the complete transparent support for every permutation of the three.
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** If del.icio.us had remained free-range, or better yet, Yahoo! had converted it into a protocol rather than a product, it would have signaled the single greatest discovery movement we’ve seen this decade, in my opinion. I’d be the first one to embrace an OpenDelicious protocol for “taste” portability.
*** I’d also support if Twitter allowed users to select a preferred set social bookmarking applications for promotion of “favorites”. Hence, any Tweets I like would be promoted through to delicious, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.
