I’ve written before about Twitter lists; I feel it’s an underrated feature of the service. However, I’m lazy and habitual. Even though TweetBot makes it easy to switch between lists, I rarely do.

I can’t keep up with everyone I want to follow on Twitter in a single stream. By grouping folks into lists, I have a natural context switch as I move them and have a better chance of keeping up with more of them. I recognize this is merely a matter of tricking myself with perception, but it works for me. I won’t scroll back 90 tweets in a single timeline, but 20-30 in 3 different timelines somehow seems more reasonable.

On my desktop I use TweetDeck for my lists, and think the columnar interface works well for the purpose.

On my mobile I’ve recently been using a different technique that has been working out pretty well for me: multiple Twitter clients.

The new TweetBot is my main timeline. I use Twitterific to follow my OwnerCamp list and Tweetbot 2 to follow my WordPress list.

I’m considering spending a little time to curate an “a-list” for close friends that I don’t want to miss updates from. If I do this, I need another client. I can’t convince the official Twitter client to stick with a list view; it keeps jumping back up a level.

So far it’s working pretty well for me.