Marketing Monster

This is Part 2 of a 3-part 4-part series. Read Part 1: What Are Twitter Lists?

Unfortunately, if you are not part of the Beta roll out, Twitter will not allow you to see the URLs of lists, even if they’ve been tagged as public. For the benefit of everyone, I will include screen shots, where practical, in addition to the link.

WHY DID TWITTER LISTS LEAVE DEVELOPERS OUT?

In the September 30th blog announcement. Nick Kallen, the project lead on Lists stated on the Twitter blog that there will be a Lists API. “This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps.”

It seems that developers were an afterthought on this Twitter Feature. Normally, developers are notified of major feature roll outs such as this well in advance and are afforded the opportunity to work with the API in before the launch. However, the development community weren’t even informed that Twitter Lists was on the development roadmap until September 30th, likely well after Twitter would have started working on it.

When the feature was released yesterday, the vast majority of developers (but interestingly, not all) didn’t even have access to the Lists API documentation until last night. When users like Robert Scoble started building lists and tweeting about them, the dev community cried foul and a draft of the API documentation was quickly made available, sending developers scrambling to integrate Lists into their offerings throughout the wee hours of last night.

HOW WILL TWITTER LISTS IMPACT DESKTOP CLIENTS?

Many original users of TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop were drawn to the services because of the list/group functionality that they offered. Those services have now evolved to offer a host of additional features, but, for many the list/group function remains the primary benefit. With the Lists API, TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop will face a whole slew of Twitter client competition who didn’t previously have a lists or a grouping function.

Now you may be thinking, yes, but I use TweetDeck/Seesmic and so using Twitter Lists doesn’t bring me any extra value. Consider that TweetDeck’s groups are confined to TweetDeck . Twitter Lists, once the developers set to work on it, will start popping up in all sorts of different apps and locations that have been built specifically to add value to the user experience. Twitter Lists will not be confined to the client that you’re running. And that reality will surely cut into established client applications’ market share.

WHAT WILL TWITTER LISTS DO TO “FOLLOW” DIRECTORIES?

The inclusion of a Lists API will threaten recommendation applications like WeFollow, Twellow, Mr. Tweet or Twibes. The categorization of people on these types of services are usually self-submitted, or in some cases, chosen by an algorithm. The resulting recommendations may not always be vetted according to your personal standards. And let’s face it, following people based on their own self-categorization is just not the same as having a personal recommendation from someone you know. Personal referrals are the preferred way that people make purchasing decisions and deciding who to invest your time with on Twitter is not much different.

Rather than taking random recommendations from Follow Directories, you could easily visit the profile of someone who’s opinion you trust and select from their lists. Let’s say you want to learn more about the players in venture capital. By clicking on his lists counter from the profile page, I can examine which lists that Guy Kawasaki has been included on. This netted me a great starter list from Christine Lu: http://twitter.com/christinelu/vc-and-angels.

As it’s possible to subscribe to lists without actually following each individual in the group, I can simply click “Follow List” from the main list page and follow the tweets of a great subset of Twitter, chosen by someone I know.

Twitter Lists also goes head-to-head with other applications which allow you to follow groups with a single click. Take TweepML for example. The developers launched their one-click group app on September 9th, exactly 3 weeks before Twitter announced Lists. Had the developers known what laid ahead on the Twitter features road map,  I wonder if they’d have developed the same product. As it stands, TweepML was quick off the mark and explained on their blog last night that it was easy to import your Twitter Lists to their service.

Thousands of applications currently exist that work with the Twitter API, from desktop and mobile clients to statistics and search properties. Smart developers should follow the lead of TweepML and integrate Twitter Lists into their products. By finding ways to use Twitter Lists to add value to existing applications, they’ll be in a better position to survive the inevitable surge of new offerings that have surely sprouted in the last 16 days.

Next up: Part 3: Popularity

Read Part 1: What Are Twitter Lists?

Part 4 will look at the opportunities that brands will have with Twitter Lists.

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