The grouping feature has been in beta for several weeks and is now being rolled out to all users

Oct 30, 2009 15:11 GMT  ·  By
Twitter Lists has been in beta for several weeks and is now being rolled out to all users
   Twitter Lists has been in beta for several weeks and is now being rolled out to all users

Twitter is finally rolling out the Lists feature to everybody and the site is abuzz with the news. This time though, it's for good reason, as the feature could prove one of the biggest improvements Twitter has seen at least since it hit the mainstream. Lists is still in beta and there have been some hiccups with the rollout but, by now, it should be available to most users.

The announcement was made on Twitter obviously, as the site's Nick Kallen tweeted: "We’re releasing lists to even more people. Don’t get your panties in a bunch, Twitter." At the time 25 percent of the service’s users had the feature enabled but as things got underway, Twitter suddenly disabled Lists for everyone after experiencing some performance issues. "We're going to temporarily turn off lists for all users for 30 minutes or so while we investigate a performance issue," Kallen tweeted. This is Twitter after all; this kind of thing doesn't faze anyone anymore.

The feature was soon restored though as it turned out that the issues were not related to Lists. The last update from Twitter was when the Lists feature was available to half of the Twitter users but by now most should see the big announcement on top of the regular homepage. Lists could be the thing Twitter needed at this point as traffic was begging to level off especially in the US.

The feature serves two main purposes, which many have been asking for a while. First, it allows users to organize the people they follow into groups based on whatever criteria they see fit. They could have their friends in one group, their family in another and their coworkers in yet another. Not only that it makes it easier to focus on the discussion, it also clears up the stream of any messages that may not be relevant to the user at that point. But perhaps even more useful, at least for some Twitter users, the Lists are shareable, meaning that anyone can follow a public List that you've created if they find it relevant. This allows users to follow a group of Twitterers in one move, but also makes it a lot easier to discover good users to follow, solving one of Twitter's biggest problems at the moment.