The feature still isn't available to the public

Oct 16, 2009 08:22 GMT  ·  By

Twitter is working on several features at the time, which have been eagerly awaited by most users. The features are still in beta and made public in limited tests but it now looks like the company has expanded the test for the Lists feature somehow. The feature was revealed a couple of weeks ago and could prove very useful in many situations as it allows users to group the people they follow in lists based on any criteria they see fit.

A couple of new details on how exactly the feature will work are also clearer now. Users will be able to create new lists from their homepage by clicking on “Create a new list,” adding a name and setting it list to public or private. The name will be very important if it's going to be a public list as it will be used in the URL where it will be saved as something like twitter.com/user/list.

The lists will then show up in the sidebar along with a link to manage them. Adding users to the lists is somewhat of a hassle if you want to add a bunch of them at a time but if the list is meant to grow in time this isn't too much of a problem. The list dedicated page allows users to manage their lists but also to view the public lists they may be a part of.

The feature could become very popular if used properly especially for people following a lot of users. By creating lists they will be able to restrict the tweets to only the group they want, making things a lot more manageable, and it means that the main stream may become increasingly less used. Another useful feature is the possibility to share the public lists, making for a recommendation system of sorts. This will also allow the creation of groups based on topics or organizations – for example publishers could group all of their editors in a list. There is still no word on when Lists will be available to all but it shouldn't be too long now even at Twitter's usual slow pace.