Twitter plans to test a new feature with a handful of people to group tweets, but it has some wondering if the company recently valued at $1 billion has become a follower rather than a leader.
Nick Kallen, lead on Twitter’s Lists project, wrote in a blog post that the idea is to allow people to create lists of Twitter accounts, from the funniest Twitter accounts to athletes, local businesses, and friends. “Lists are public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you’ve created are linked from your profile,” he wrotePeople subscribe to the lists, which makes the feature a tool to discover potentially great tweets and accounts. Twitter lit up with tweets, asking Kallen at @nk for a spot to test the service.
Moscow, Russia-based freelance Web developer Konstantin Kovshenin sent a tweet to Kallen requesting a space on the debug team. “I’m dreaming of the retweets GUI for ages, and now lists, and you all missed me again,” he tweets.
Some point to the fact that Twitter is playing catch-up with third-party application developers such as TweetDeck, which allow people to create lists and follow tweets in separate columns. Connectual Managing Partner Aaron Goldman says the difference between TweetDeck and Twitter is that the latter will give people the option to make lists public. He says it’s not unlike WeFollow, which aggregates lists based on specific interest categories.
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