Although Lists isn’t a new concept (Friendfeed has had them for months) they have proven to be a great addition to Twitter. Lists make it easier than ever to categorize users and curate content for your followers and yourself. The ability to create lists does indeed add fantastic value to Twitter, and lists can even be grabbed as an embeddable widget that can easily be customized and added to your personal website.
Looking for cool twitterers for your lists? Look no further. Here are 25 notable geeks, picked from five excellent tech lists.
The Twitter team (by @Twitter)
List URL: http://twitter.com/twitter/team
The Twitter team list is the most followed list on Twitter and contains a complete list of the Twitter staff. Five of my favorite team members include:
@jack – Jack Dorsey is a very cool and brilliant man who recently announced a new company he has been working on called Square (@square). Square is very cool technology that allows merchants to accept payment via a little square that plugs into the headphone jack of mobile phones. This is a disruptive technology because it allows merchants to wirelessly process credit cards for several hundred dollars cheaper than any alternative technology. Oh yeah, he invented Twitter, too.
@ev – Evan Williams is Twitter’s CEO. Prior to Twitter he helped started Blogger.com, which sold to Google for $500 million. Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin praised Evan as a testament to the impact an entrepreneur can make on the Web.
@biz – Biz Stone is a co-founder of Twitter. He worked with Evan as a co-founder of Blogger.com and has over 500 blog posts written, although these days he usually tweets. He is a self-declared genius and despite this bold claim it is hard to doubt him given his track record.
@nk – Nick Kallen has the Twitter bio “Wealth and personal achievement expert.” He is the chief engineer of Twitter Lists.
@vl – Vitor Lourenço is a product designer at Twitter. Thank him for Twitter looking smooth. Check out his homepage for a better idea of his influential style.
Most influential in tech (by @Scobleizer)
List URL: http://twitter.com/Scobleizer/most-influential-in-tech
To quote Robert Scoble’s own description, this list is about “people who make stuff happen in and to the technology industry.”
Five notable people from this list are:
@chr1sa – According to his bio, Chris Anderson is “Wired, Long Tail, Free, DIY Drones, and BookTour.” He is the editor in chief of Wired magazine and wrote the highly influential book on how the future of business is selling more of less, The Long Tail.
@rww – Richard MacManus is the founder of Read Write Web, one of the most popular Blogs on the net. Follow ReadWriteWeb for the latest in web technology and social media trends.
@loic – Loic Le Meur is the founder of Seesmic and the annual LeWeb conference in France. His video blog can be found at loic.tv. Seesmic is a software company that makes third party social media software for Twitter and Facebook. The two most popular Seesmic programs include Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop. Seesmic Desktop also offers list support, but right now this is only for the PC version. Desktop is currently my Twitter application of choice.
@steverubel – Steve Rubel is a SVP and the Director of Insights for Edelman Digital. He is also an AdAge columnist and an influential lifestreamer.
@finkd – Not an active tweeter, finkd is the nickname of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Great content (by @Jason_Pollock)
List URL: http://twitter.com/Jason_Pollock/great-content
Great Content is currently the 37th most popular list on Twitter, according to Listorious.com, and is followed by over 700 people.
@Jason_Pollock – The founder of this list, Jason Pollock is a documentary filmmaker, who recently finished producing the movie The Youngest Candidate. Jason is friends with Twitter’s most followed user, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and is the former assistant to filmmaker Michael Moore.
@Gar1n – Hey, it’s me Garin, 🙂 I am the author of this post, and if you have not guessed already I am an avid Twitterer. I have built 19 Twitter lists so far, so I am fast approaching the maximum of 20. You should follow me on Twitter because I create and share the best content I find on the Web from awesome companies like @pingdom, and everywhere else on the Web!
@mattcutts – Matt Cutts is the head of the Google Web Spam team. He is a likable geek and an informative blogger about SEO and Google over at mattcutts.com.
@zee – Zee is a prolific blogger and the CEO editor in chief of The Next Web. He is a young, recently married, prolific, and outspoken geek from the Netherlands London. Well worth a follow.
@gapingvoid – Hugh Macleod was the keynote speaker at the MeshMarketing conference I recently attended in Toronto. He is an influential business man, winery owner, and cartoonist with a unique outlook on life that has managed to make him very successful. He is also a part of both Chris Brogan’s Third Tribe list and Copyblogger’s Third Tribe list, and those two guys are two of the most powerful bloggers on the Internet today.
iPhone (by @ravenme)
List URL: http://twitter.com/ravenme/iphone
Since I am an Apple and iPhone fanboy I like to stay informed about all of the latest apps and trends. This list is great to get all of the latest, greatest iPhone news.
@macrumors – Live updates about everything Apple. They have 82,000+ followers because they are a solid source of information and rumors about Apple and its products.
@gruber – I don’t know too much about Gruber, but his blog Daring Fireball is quite successful with anything but timid tidbits about tech and Apple. He also has one of my favorite Twitter bios out there: “Raconteur”
@handmark – Handmark is a world-leading creator and distributor of mobile applications and services for BlackBerry, iPhone, Window Mobile, Android, Palm, Java and Symbian.
@taptaptap – Bio: “tasty bits for your iPhone,” and that just about sums it up. Tweets about iPhone apps, mostly.
@iPhone – Although this guy has the official iPhone Twitter name he is not endorsed by Apple. He’s still worth a follow since he usually posts useful info.
Note: If you are an iPhone user you can now monitor your site with the wicked new Pingdom iPhone app, version 2.0!
Top 50 tech (by @favstar)
List URL: http://twitter.com/Favstar/top-50-tech
Favstar.fm is a site that tracks how many favorites certain tweets get. They also made some cool lists, and this one with 50 the finest folks from tech is my favorite. Here are five of the best:
@problogger – Darren Rowse is one of the most successful bloggers on the net who has been earning a six figure income from the medium for the past several years.
@wired – Wired is an awesome magazine about how technology is changing the world. Also, their site has several of the world’s most popular blogs.
@mashable – Pete Cashmore has built his blog Mashable.com into the definitive social media source on the Web. This has earned him a spot on Twitter’s Suggested Users List and he has been able to use this position to expand his Twitter influence to almost two million followers.
@zeldman – Jeffrey Zeldman is a highly influential web designer and author of the book Designing With Web Standards. He is the founder of web design studio Happy Cog and is also behind A List Apart.
@jeresig – John Resig is the creator of jQuery and works for Mozilla. He also invented the Easy Retweet Button, which makes it even easier for people to retweet cool posts. (Like this one 😉 )
More about Twitter lists
A third-party site called Listorious has already been built to organize Twitter lists in different meaningful ways. In addition to allowing users to recommend people for lists, Listorious also lists the top 140 lists, and the top 140 most listed people.
Want to get listing but not sure where to start? Create a conversationlist. A “Conversation List” is an auto-generated and auto-updated list of the people you talk to on Twitter.
Cool as Twitter lists are, they are not without some restrictions. Each Twitter account can create up to a maximum of 20 lists, and each list can include up to 500 users. This may sound like plenty but I have almost maxed out my 20 lists, and I have noticed several other people in the same situation. Robert Scoble has maxed out the 500 users limit for five of his lists already and is complaining. Do you think these restrictions are reasonable? What is your favorite Twitter List? Let us know in the comments below!
About the author:
Garin Kilpatrick is a community manager for the writing website for students, eduify.com. Check out his personal blog at Gar1n.com.
