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Using lists on Twitter can be very useful if not for any other reason that this:
Note: you don’t need to follow another user to add them to a list; if you want to read a user’s Tweets but not see their messages in your main timeline every day, lists allow you to do that. Similarly, following someone else’s list does not mean you follow all users in that list. Rather, you follow the list itself.
This is taken right off the Twitter Help Center website. So in essence you can see what someone is saying on twitter without actually following them. Why would you want to do that you ask? Well some people have gone to great lengths to put together some great lists centered around a specific topic, career, or genre. And the best part is that if the list is public you can follow it! As an educator I use lists mostly to organize the people I follow into categories. For example I could create a list for kindergarten teachers, techie teachers, international teachers, administrators, early year teachers etc.
As I said the beauty of the list is that once it’s been created you can make the list public and share it out. Conversely you can follow a list that someone else has made.
Lists can be also be temporary. For example if I know a group of people on Twitter who are working on a specific project I can create a list containing those people and when the project is over I can delete the list.
To me a list falls somewhere between using a hashtag and my straight up timeline. The topics in a list are more specific but not as specific as a hash-tagged conversation.
Read more about Twitter list here on the Twitter website.
On a side note, Amy over at #Kinderchat has put together a kick butt Prezi on why Twitter is so powerful for educators. Check it out on the #Kinderchat blog.
Does anyone have a list they would like to share? Can anyone think of a list that they wish they had?
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