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.
I use lists extensively, and I wish the official Twitter app supported them better. Get rid of that useless “Discover” column and let me make columns of my lists instead.
@alexkingorg You’re finding it’s faster to switch clients than to use Tweetbot’s list switching feature?
@Penguin Not necessarily faster, but it means my client is always in the context I expect it when I go to it. Also, having multiple springboard icons reminds me to check each list.
@alexkingorg I use lists almost exclusively to read content. I have about 8 lists. I treat my timeline as a psuedo list.
Yep, very similar to what I do. I’ve experimented a bit, but currently I have a must-read following 17 people in which I read every tweet, then a secondary list following 54 people where I read most tweets. I prune as it gets too noisy.