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I love the new Twitter list feature, but aside from replacing Follow Friday, I have no use for it.
I don’t want to batch people together and have “one more thing” I have to look at. If anything, I want to cut the number of folks I’m following down to 1,000 (or less).
Not surprisingly, the new feature does not come without controversy. Chris Brogan thinks the lists are exclusionary. Robert Scoble disagrees.
Basically: Brogan says lists make people feel left out for not making one. Scoble says people should be excluded from a list if it doesn’t make sense to be for them to be there.
It’s a funny debate because they’re talking about two different things. Scoble is making a very specific, logical argument, Chris is talking in a more general, big picture view. Both are right.
But if you don’t think Twitter Lists are exclusionary …
The Five Must Follow People On Twitter:
Everyone else is a waste of time! (the one line description that would go with this list on Listorious.)
1. @Mashable (Disclosure: I write for them)
2. @huffingtonPost (Disclosure: I write for them too)
3. @BarackObama (Disclosure: As mentioned in Newsweek, I voted for him.)
4. @Jesse (Fact: Everyone loves Jesse Stay.)
5. @Alyssa_Milano (Best celebrity on Twitter.)
What’s Wrong With This List?
Well for starters, if it became the default list for Twitter (otherwise known as the Suggested User List), the same people who are saying lists are not exclusionary would be complaining incessantly.
But let’s say this is just a popular list you see on Listorious or maybe you saw it on Mashable or even on the Twitter company blog to highlight some of the popular ones.
What’s wrong?
-The list is entirely subjective, and two of the five might be seen as self-promotion. They are. I want you to follow Mashable and The Huffington Post, I benefit from your readership.
-I included one politician , and I know my fellow Republicans these days have lost their fucking mind and will immediately complain about seeing Obama (or any Democrat for that matter) on a popular list of people you must follow. So now they’re pissed and feel left out. Kind of like how I feel as a moderate with the lunatic conservative fringe running the show.
-Outside of the tech crowd, you might not know who Jesse Stay is, so immediately someones i going to say, “Well who the fuck is he and why am I not on there?” Ok. Maybe not if I had this list, but if a more popular Twitter personality like Ev, Biz, or Kutcher made a list with this name, you know people are going to feel … yep. Excluded.
And finally, I included Alyssa on here, who is a celebrity, which will immediately make someone go, “Well she’s a celebrity! She shouldn’t be on that list! It’s preferential treatment!”
Don’t believe me? Do I need to say anything more than Oprah?
The lists are exclusionary, and people will feel left out for not making a popular list like this. The key term here is popular. If I had 100 followers and made this list, you wouldn’t care, and we wouldn’t be talking about it. But if I was popular, you would.
In a very specific instances, like the ones Scoble talks about, not many people will care, but a lot of the lists I’m seeing are not that specific and I suspect this will be true for most lists.
Does The Number Of Lists You’re On Matter? NO!
People, myself included initially, are now saying the number of lists you appear on is what matters, not the number of followers. Who is saying this? The same people who used to say the number of followers matter, before they got eclipsed by celebrities and people with no business having the number of followers that they do (that would be me.)
You better believe the second the celebrities catch on to the lists, or when their fans do, this bullshit claim will stop. It always does. Whenever the early adopters and smart marketers get on board with something, they come up with a way to measure their value against yours. The second that scale gets tipped, they cry foul and run away to find a new measurement.
So no, the number of lists you’re on doesn’t matter. And even if you’re on a lot of lists, it’s no different from following that person. All the list provides you is another stream to get lost in. Quieter? Maybe. More organized? Absolutely. But. You still have to compete with other people on that list for attention, so there’s no real benefit for you to be on a list.
What Does Matter?
When it comes to a social network? Nothing. Nothing matters. It’s all sound and fury. Unless there is a point of conversion. If you have 1,000 followers, and if more than half of them show up to meet you when you announce a tweet-up, that’s a point of conversion. All those numbers become actual people that you’re interacting with in the physical world.
If you say you’re raising money for a cause, and more than half of your followers donate, that’s a point of conversion. Those artificial social networking numbers become real dollars.
So you guys can keep your large follower counts and high list count metrics, it’s all bullshit unless it means something substantial offline.
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