This photo is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic

My research on digital legacy issues over the last 18-months has led me to explore the area of content ownership, copyright, data portability and that dry, dusty thing that everything online has: Terms of Service.

When was the last time you read the TOS of Twitter, Gmail or Facebook (whose TOS has more words than the U.S. Constitution)?

Chances are very good that you’ve never read the legalese that is buried in the bowels of the least-frequented pages of a service. These backwaters are often filled with paragraphs in ALL CAPS, a contractual practice that predates the connotation of yelling online, yet still makes me think a lawyer is vigourously wagging a finger at me.

Let me save you some moments of your life that you’ll never get back. Here’s the gist of what most TOS contain:

You’ve just signed away the exclusive rights to your content.

You may still own the copyright. You may still own the intellectual property. But, that service where you just clicked “I Agree” upon sign up can likely do what they want with your stuff, without compensation, in perpetuity.

Will they actually use it?  Will they profit from it? Will they use it in a way that is not how you wish it to be represented?

Maybe not. But, you need to be aware that they now have the legal right to.

What does it mean for business and marketing?

Let’s talk photo sharing for a moment. Say you are a professional photographer and you use Flickr because you know you can set the level of copyright from All Rights Reserved to a very open and flexible Creative Commons license, depending on your needs and intent.

Did you know that by simply sharing a link to your photo on Twitter its content now falls under their TOS, regardless of the TOS of the service your photo resides? And that they can sub-license it?

Neither did I. Until I read this post.

This means you can no longer legally sell exclusive rights to anything you link to on Twitter.

Is Twitter Evil?

If they are, then so are thousands of other online services. I don’t believe that someone at Twitter is masterminding profiting from your linked content. It’s simply a case of services needing to cover their digital behinds. In comparison to analog printed works, where the process itself made content scarce, and therefore, containable, the flow of data is raging torrent that’s out of control.

Without this type of TOS, would Twitter be open to rights infringement simply by displaying the link to your content? What if your tweet, and its associated content on Twitpic or Flickr, were featured on CNN? Without the right to sub-license it, is it conceivable that you could sue Twitter? Possibly.

The letter of the law has not caught up with the sharing frenzy that is inherent to web 2.0. My feeling is that it will take nothing short of a revolution to change the status quo so that we control exclusive rights to our data.

Call me a cynic, but, more likely exclusivity is lost. Revolutions take passion and ignorance is bliss.

What really got my attention was how the video was presented and edited. It’s a great example of how a small business can think creatively to capture attention (it got mine at least, and possibly yours too) and become memorable. They took a straight up audio interview and created a video that stands out from the crowd. It’s funny, unexpected and very cleverly done.

interview with Julien Smith. Author , blogger, podcaster and all round nice guy.

Snapshot

If you’re in a small business, consider what Web Courses Bangkok did:

• thought about who would be prominent, interesting and relevant to their prospective customers
• arranged a long-distance audio interview
• enlisted a video editor to create something different, entertaining and informative (see update below)
• asked the interviewee to mention the video publicly
• ensured that social sharing options were available on their site
• had a presence on Twitter to engage in direct conversation

I was compelled to share the video on Twitter, Facebook and this blog because the approach was unique and creative. Ben Powell summed it up on Twitter:

Tell me, how have you made a splash for your business with something different?

Update: Ben Powell left this comment:

Just to add a little to your post if I may, we’re a small business without much of a marketing budget so we didn’t really have the ability to hire anyone to help, so we called in favors had to learn how to make a .gif, teach ourselves how to use video editing software… It was all done for the grand total of $0.

Small business dont need a budget to do something that has a twist on the ususal, just time and enthusiasm….. and a few skilled friends of course.

For those interested in discovering how Twitter apps can turbocharge your experience, here is the presentation.

Let me know in the comments if I’ve missed something that you love, or if you found something new that will make Twitter even better for you.

My favourite discovery

By far, the happiest surprise I found when researching the apps for this presentation was Quote URL. This app allows you to drag and drop the URL for individual tweets into their interface from your Twitter profile or from search.twitter.com. It then arranges the tweets in chronological order and presents you with a permalink. Now you can send someone a link to an entire Twitter conversation or commentary. Even better, the conversation becomes embeddable for your blog. No more cutting, pasting and manual linking. For bloggers, this will be a great tool.

Here’s an example.

1. 
   MarkGoren @AdeleMcAlear waxing poetic about Twitter at #smbmtl. 25 Aug 2010 from Twitter for iPhone
2. 
   enkerli Discussing Twitter penetration/acceptance with @adelemcalear. Twitter seniority (mine: feb 2007) Locate power in app. 25 Aug 2010 from Ping.fm
3. 
   lucaconti http://ow.ly/i/3phK @adelemcalear started her twitter presentation. Le Bistrote is full of people! #smbmtl 25 Aug 2010 from HootSuite
4. 
   MarkGoren Great refresher on Twitter by @AdeleMcalear at #smbmtl. Look for the deck on SlideShare later. 25 Aug 2010 from Twitter for iPhone
5. 
   MarkGoren #smbmtl – nice shout out to @RowFeeder by @AdeleMcAlear. She highly recommends it. 25 Aug 2010 from Twitter for iPhone
6. 
   sebprovencher Thank you @AdeleMcAlear for mentioning @neediumhq (http://www.needium.com) during #smbmtl! 25 Aug 2010 from web
7. 
   JumboJet04 @AdeleMcAlear great presentation today ! Thanks for the useful info 25 Aug 2010 from Echofon
8. 
   MarcSnyder @AdeleMcAlear juste realised I joined twitter before you did 25 Aug 2010 from web in reply to AdeleMcAlear
9. 
   MarcSnyder Excellent #SMBMtl de @AdeleMcAlear et @sebprovencher, avec @newraycom, @enkerli, @lucaconti, @valeriewindsor, @valeriewindsor notamment 25 Aug 2010 from web
10. 
    KaiDesignStudio @AdeleMcAlear Thanks for sharing about Tweeter apps @ Social Media Breakfast, learned a lot! 25 Aug 2010 from web in reply to AdeleMcAlear
11. 
    vandy_pants Really enjoyed my first #smbmtl today, with talks from @AdeleMcAlear and @sebprovencher. And now, back to school mode. Rats! 25 Aug 2010 from Twitter for iPhone
12. 
    mperron Great presentations by @AdeleMcAlear & @sebprovencher at Social Media Breakfast Montreal. 25 Aug 2010 from TweetDeck

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Thanks to Jeff Taylor and Dan Maitland from Heelatch for the opportunity to speak to such a great  crowd. And thanks to everyone who contributed to the great Q&A afterward.

Be sure to check out Sebastien Provencher‘s presentation on the Group Buying industry. It was fascinating and enlightening.

See you next time!

I live in Montreal, a serious hockey town. The Montreal Canadiens were founded in 1909,and according to Wikipedia, they are “the longest continuously operating professional ice hockey team and the only existing NHL club to predate the founding of the NHL, as well as one of the oldest North American sports franchises. The franchise is one of the “Original Six” teams, a description used for teams that were part of the NHL from 1942 until the 1967 expansion.”

Right now, the Habs (short for Habitants), are playing the Philadelphia Flyers in the Eastern Conference finals. The winner of this series of  games will go on to play the Stanley Cup Championship, the pinnacle of every hockey player’s aspirations and the stuff of dreams for boys with skates, most particularly here in Montreal. To an extent, Montrealers feel like they own hockey. It’s our game. It’s part of the lifeblood and pulse of this city and a unifying force between all cultures who live here.

Much to the chagrin of my friends in Montreal, I am not a hockey fan. This is close to sacrilege. I have nothing against hockey, I’m just not big on sports in a general sense. I ignore them universally.

But, it’s impossible to ignore when Montreal is in the playoffs: after each goal, there is honking in the streets, and shouting spills out of open windows as neighbours erupt in cheers or frustration over every point won or lost. Hockey playoffs in Montreal compel you to pay attention.

Twitter Hashtags to Track the Game

And so it was a few weeks back when I found myself checking Twitter for the Habs score against the Washington Capitals. At that time, I noticed several hashtags: #habs #gohabs #gohabsgo and #habsDC. I had assumed that the final one, #habsDC had to do with the fact that the game was against Washington and was played in DC.

So why is it tonight, when Montreal was playing game 3 against Philadelphia, the #habsDC hastag was the top trending hockey tag on Twitter in Canada?

Thinking back, while the Canadiens were playing all seven games against the Pittsburgh Penguins, the #habsDC tag was ever-present. I thought perhaps people who were Tweeting the Washington game simply didn’t bother changing the hashtag. However, I find that a bit strange. I know Twitter is new to many, but, you’d think there were enough users out there who would know to change hashtags and have that be of influence.

I went on the search for services that give more information about specific hashtags and found several (thanks oneforty.com!) According to What the Hashtag?!, the tag is defined at” Montreal Canadiens fans hashtag initiated by @DenisCoderre.”

Political Sports Fan

Who is hockey fan Denis Coderre? He is a federal politician with a riding in Montreal. Prominent in national politics, he appointed the Secretary of State for Amateur Sport for three-years and helped to establish the World Anti-Doping Agency in Montreal. He also accused NHL player Shane Doan of the Phoenix Coyotes of uttering racists slurs against French-speaking referees in a game in Montreal, resulting in legal action on each side.

Denis Coderre is also one the country’s most active and engaged politician on Twitter and will live-tweet Canadiens games with enthusiasm.

Let’s think about this for a moment: a politician’s personal hockey hashtag overtakes the more generic and natural #habs to become the top trending topic in Canada on the night of a winning semi-final Canadiens playoff game. That, in a city that lives, breathes and riots over hockey.

Extraordinary.

Manipulation or Enthusiasm?

As I was pondering this achievement aloud on Twitter, Habs fan and hockey blogger Kyle Roussel of Montreal took this view of the custom hashtag: “It would mean a lot more to the #Habs twitter community if he’d use the regular one instead of usurping one for himself.” Though, he did concede that no one forced the Twitter public to use one hashtag over another, he didn’t see the connection between a politician and a hockey team.

I suspect that the general cynicism that the public has about politicians leaves some with the feeling that perhaps Denis Coderre is manipulating the association with the Habs for his own personal gain.

However, I think that most people use the #habsdc hashtag without knowing that it references the politician. Geneviève Côté believed it it to be “DC to shorten Washington in hashtag and it survived when Pitt started.” After viewing the link I had to What the Hashtag?!, she replied, “I may be wrong… he’s a very good marketer, he may have used the DC synchronicity.”

Given his past, it’s likely that Denis Coderre is simply an enthusiastic fan who enjoys using Twitter in the same way that others do when they gather around a shared event.  When asked why he chose to start his own hashtag vs. using the more universal #habs, he responded:

@AdeleMcAlear simply because I enjoy direct interaction with my 10225 followers and it became a trend. No competition just fun and passion

What do you think? Is this a case of a politician riding the wave of a popular topic for his own purposes? Are Habs fans sheep for re-using a hashtag that they may not understand? Should Denis Codere be congratulated for achieving something that most marketers dream about for their clients? Are the Habs going all the way to the Stanley Cup?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

I could take this opportunity to rant about how much I despise the stranglehold that Canada’s 3 cellular infrastructure providers (of which Rogers is one) has on it’s population, or prattle on about how we pay the 3rd highest mobile data rates in the world, or of how we have no unlimited mobile data plans, or talk about how this is hurting innovation and business in this country.

But, I won’t just now. That’s a post for another day.

This time I’m going to indulge some geeky marketing interests and delve into my fascination for stats. Especially stats about the growth of digital communication within a Canadian context. This video fits the bill.

One thing I love is that the source citations for the stats are included in the additional information for the video when you view it in YouTube. As a marketer, you never know when you might need a stat, and as a viewer it’s good to know that they’re backing up what they’re claiming. I’ll save you the clicks and reproduce it here.

SOURCES
Facts in Next is Now are calculated based on data from the following sources:
[0:10] Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Information Week
[0:18] 24 hours of video uploaded per minute, The Official YouTube Blog
[0:25] Facebakers, Facebook Statistics Canada
[0:32] Normalized, averaged Facebook growth (Facebook Press Room milestones)
[0:49] iTunes download of The Godfather vs 56kbps
[0:55] Speeds of 50mbps and up in Canada
[1:16] Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association
[1:21] Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association
[1:29] Ipsos Reid Interactive Group
[1:39] Amazon Kindle capacity
[1:43] Bedford Public Library collection: nearly 12,000 books
[1:52] Android: Androlib / iPhone: Apple
[1:55] Match.com iPhone App
[2:32] OTX, 2008 Longitudinal Media Experience Study
[2:36] SRG, Digital Life Canada, November 2009
[2:40] SRG, Digital Life Canada, November 2009
[2:56] AmDocs, The Connected World Vision
[3:16] TweeSpeed
[3:20] 15 million in U.S. alone. CTIA-The Wireless Association, Wireless Industry Survey
[3:24] Symantec, 2000-2009: The Spam Explosion

Nice job to the team at Thornley Fallis and 76design, and Keith McArthur at Rogers.

Now, if Rogers really wants to see the growth of digital communications in Canada, they’ll be the first company to bring an unlimited mobile data plan to this country, and make it comparably affordable to our U.S. cousins. Whadd’ya say?

Watching the Chirp conference live stream on Justin.tv and reading the back channel #chirp tweets, conveniently brought together in one page on  TweetChat, it was difficult to keep up with the flood of information that was being made available. Twitter is so notoriously poor at communicating with their developer community and their users, that when they’ve seemingly turned on the fire hose of information, it’s a little overwhelming.

Here are some highlights:

Stats:
Registered users = 105.8 million
Monthly uniques=180 million
Daily signups=300,000
Posts per day = 55 million
Search queries per day = 600 million (the vast majority through the API)
Over 100,000 registered Twitter applications.

Geolocation:
Twitter is releasing Points of Interest, a geolocation tool tied to places. Instead of latitude and longitude, you’d have actual place names. They say that it will complement Foursquare and Gowalla, not compete with them.

Favorites:
A new API for Favorites will unlock interesting opportunities to manipulate more data. Will it be about influence? Will it be about topics and keywords? Who knows? Hackers will have 2 days to play with it during the conference.

Annotations:
This one is big. Twitter’s API will soon allow developers to add meta data to anything. The possibilities for applications to extract and manipulate data in new and interesting ways is huge. This will be opened up in the next quarter.

Resonance Score:
Marketers, PR folk, SEO/SEM practitioners and anyone else who’s in the business of increasing influence had best listen up. A Resonance Score is the Twitter equivalent of Google’s Page Rank. It examines tweets, favorites, retweets, link clicks, avatar clicks, hashtag reuse, etc. They have theories about how this will play out, but Twitter is going to roll this out slowly while they tinker with what it really means.

Promoted Tweets:
Announced yesterday this is Twitter’s long awaited revenue model. To start, Promoted Tweets is being implemented by Starbucks, Bravo and Virgin America. They offer the brands the opportunity to pin a tweet to the top of keyword search results. The Tweet is shaded to make it stand apart from the regular stream. The length of time it will stay in that position and the value of the tweet will be  tied to Resonance Score. At the start the costing is based on CPM but will evolve into ROI once Twitter understands Resonance Score better.

On Thursday, Starbucks is starting a campaign using Promoted Tweets that will involve giving free coffee to people who come in with a reusable tumbler. They addressed the difficulty of running promotions where they are speaking to an international audience. Starbucks stated that when geolocation can be applied, they will be able to refine their  messaging.

Twitter will be offering a 50/50 revenue split with application developers who opt-in to Promoted Tweets. Participation is not mandatory and 3rd-parties are allowed to have their own advertising models. However, Twitter is working on a policy that will prohibit the ecosystem from certain types of advertising that  would damage the brand integrity, for instance, having ads that were indistinguishable from regular tweets.

Now that Twitter will allow developers access to all that meta data through annotations, how will our data be used for targeted promoted tweets?

Mobile Apps:
The RIM partnered Blackberry app, released this week has resulted in 100,000 new users in 3 days; yesterday the Blackberry app was used on 1.7% of all Tweets. Twitter is also developing an Android app. These join the iPhone app that they released this week. These releases have caused their partners in the ecosystem to question their intentions in competing against 3rd-party development and the future stability of creating apps for Twitter.

User Streams:
Real time information being fed directly to you. No polling the system, no waiting, no rate limits. The API for this is being made available to developers for 48 hours to play with. (There’s a 2 day Twitter hacker event concurrent with Chirp.) Here’s a 3-minute clip from Ryan Sarver @rsarver detailing User Streams:

Watch live video from Bwana.TV on Justin.tv

Home for Devs:
During the conference, Twitter launched dev.twitter.com, the new home for developers to centralize and streamline availability of information and API documentation that will grow to replace the wiki and Google Docs. Documentation will now be generated directly from the code, rather than Twitter creating it manually (resulting in errors and a slow time to post.) The audience showed their relief and appreciation with the loudest applause of the day.

@Anywhere:
Also live today, the @anywere API will allow Twitter to be embedded into media outlets in an interactive way. The Guardian is incorporating @anywhere in their coverage of the UK elections as a way for people to connect directly with politicians.

Notes From the Executive:

• Evan Williams (@Ev) said Twitter was not a social network platform, but a “public interest graph” (as opposed to Facebook’s “private social graph”).
• Dick Costolo (@dickc) stated that Twitter is working on having syndication by the end of this year “or people back stage won’t be working at Twitter any more … including me.”
• @dickc also said that they’d release the number of active accounts from the 105 million registered accounts. But, he stressed that Twitter is often consumed on other sites by people without accounts.
• @Ev says Twitter will be releasing an integrated link shortener. They’ve been using one internally in their own DMs. (Uh oh Bit.ly!)

Misc:

• The Library of Congress has acquired every public tweet since Twitter started 4 years ago. They will continue to archive all public tweets.
• 30% – 40% of the audience indicated that they were hiring.
• Great quotes from Aaron Gotwalt of CoTweet: “Think big. Iterate violently.” and  “Central Pennsylvania: Silicon pasture”
• will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas took the stage to talk about how musicians will be developers, aggregators of people and content.
• @KaraSwisher did a great job moderating a panel of Twitter application investors, injecting humour and forthrightness into the afternoon. (She was the only woman guest on the stage today.)

Developers: The Power Behind Twitter

I’ve said it many times before: Twitter gets it’s real power from 3rd-party applications. Twitter application developers are the ones who are building the tools that add value to our experience and fuel the intelligence that we’re demanding from this otherwise simplistic platform.

So, show developers a little respect and love for all that they do for Twitter users. Coding takes fuel. Find out what kind of boost your favorite app needs. Is it vocal support? If they’re fledgling, maybe they just need to pay the rent, so pay for an app or give them a donation.

Lastly, please take a few minutes to visit oneforty.com. Started by my buddy Laura Fitton (@pistachio), it’s a tremendous resource for all things Twitter (and is one of the few female-founded start-ups around Twitter.) It’s like an app store where you can search for applications, read and leave reviews, and find just what you need from one of the 100,000 registered developers in the Twitter ecosystem.

10 Things PodCamp Is:

1. not just about podcasting
2. an unconference for new and social media
3. free (in most cities)
4. a great place to learn
5. open to anyone to present – just sign up
6. relaxed in attitude
7. just as exciting in the hallways and at meet-ups
8. wonderful for bringing avatars to life
9. filled with interesting folks
10. inspiring

Rule of Two Feet:

• This rule of PodCamp is that you are free to leave any session at any time if  you are not learning anything from it. Don’t stay in one spot if you’d rather be somewhere else. It’s OK. No one will be offended. Off you go!

5 Essential Things to Bring to Podcamp:

1. Business cards – you’ll be meeting a lot of people
2. Breath mints – see #1
3. An open mind
4. Comfortable shoes
5. A smile

5 Optional Things to Bring to Podcamp:

1. Media creation devices: camera / video camera / audio recorder
2. Laptop / smart phone
3. Water bottle
4. Knowledge to share freely
5. Courage to talk to strangers

More Info:

• My session: Saturday, February 20 @ 3:30 PM in room RCC 201 & brief podcast about it here.
• List of all the sessions at Podcamp Toronto
• Podcamp Toronto 2010 schedule
• Check out podcamp.org for more information about Podcamp, including upcoming and previous cities,
• Check out my video interview about the history of Podcamp with it’s co-founder, Chris Brogan.

See you there!

UPDATE 10/29/30 – Google releases Sidewiki bookmarklet – “utilize Google Sidewiki on any browser, even if you don’t have the Google Toolbar installed.”

Tonight I came across Ed Lee’s post about Google Sidewiki, along with his recommendations. In it, he calls attention to Dave Jones, VP Digital Communications at Hill & Knowlton who doesn’t care much for Google Sidewiki. He says, “Sidewiki is like a bunch of people walking through that virtual front door and helping themselves to a boardroom to have a noisy chat about all the things they love and hate about the organization.”

To try to get people to leave comments on his blog rather than in Sidewiki, Dave Jones has posted his position and his request to the Sidewiki on his home page of DaveJones.ca.

Now, whether you like Sidewiki or not, I think it’s a good idea to post a welcome message there for your own site. Maybe you want to encourage people to comment right on your site, or, maybe you want to tell them why you don’t allow commenting and explain your position. Whatever you post, be aware that:

• you have no control over what people will post to the Sidewiki
• the comments are indexable by Google, including your own message
• comments are not physically contained on your site, but within Google
• commenters can highlight text on the page and comment upon it in Sidewiki
• every page of your site has its own Sidewiki

This last point is particularly important for implementing your welcome message. Be sure that you are posting the message to the home page of your site. But, also be aware that people may come to your site via a link to a blog post or may land on an interior page of your site. Where warranted, you may want to add a message to additional pages where comments may have been turned off for a specific reason. But, I would resist the urge to post to every page in your site as it might be viewed as company-generated spam.

As a site owner, Google Sidewiki will “pin” your post to the top of the Sidewiki and highlight it in green. After you’ve downloaded Google Toolbar and clicked open your Sidewiki, you’ll see this:

If you have not yet verified your site with Google’s Webmaster Tools and linked the site to your Google Account, you’ll need to go through those steps. The whole process is outlined here.

You can’t control what people will write on your pages’ Sidewikis, but perhaps you can help to set the tone and maybe even direct people to site resources where they are equally free to express themselves.

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• Opportunity knocks with Google Sidewiki (nevillehobson.com)
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Photo: Jerome Paradis

Last week, I spoke at webcom Montreal 09 along with Shel Holtz, Sean Moffitt and a host of other great speakers. This bi-annual conference features topics aimed at decision-makers and professionals in marketing, internal and external communications and those who want to understand and master the Internet.

I delivered my session, Twitter Tools for Strategic Marketing, with the aim of helping marketers who represent brands to get more out of their Twitter experience. It highlighted which 3rd party applications they could use to add real value and market intelligence to their Twitter efforts.

Because having the right tools to do your job is essential to success, I presented applications that were a selection of what is available to help manage corporate tweets, analyze sentiment, track opinions, conduct market research, find influencers, monitor brand mentions, track trends in real-time and more.

Shel Holtz gave the keynote Tactical Transparency: The Value of Access to Information and then followed up with a second  session on how Your Employees are Your Brand. Here’s a brief excerpt (apologies for the itty bitty jiggy cam):

One of my favourite sessions of the day was Sylvain Grand’Maison’s rapid-fire presentation The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Traditional Media’s Web Experience. In it, he highlighted how francophone mainstream media in Quebec are failing to deliver a good online experience.

Another highlight of the day was discovering WebCamp. In its 4th year, it was held upstairs from web  com and got back to basics. The concept of Praized co-founder, and well-known Montreal developer, Sylvain Carle, the un-conference was a circle discussion of issues important to the community. I was only able to stay for a short time but was excited by a concept that Sylvain had – a networking event similar to speed dating, but for Marketers and business people to meet developers and programmers. (Coincidentally, I’d had this very thought several days earlier!) This led into a discussion about self-branding for techies and IdentityCamp. I’m always impressed with the level of creativity and commitment to innovation that the Montreal development community has. If you want to view some of the discussions (mostly in French), they are here on Laurent Lasalle’s Qik. <link to Laurent’s Qik>

My thanks to Claude Malaison for inviting me to speak at webcom 09 and congratulations to him for holding another successful conference.

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WHAT IS IT?

Back on September 30th, Twitter announced on their blog that they would be launching their new Lists feature to a small group of users to Beta test. Lists allow Twitter users to organize the people they follow into groups. By segmenting your following list into groups, you can then filter tweets from your main stream and just view the tweets originating from a selected list. You can also subscribe to other people’s lists.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

There is a new section in the right-hand sidebar for List management. Create a new list by clicking on New List the sidebar. Give the list a name and it will become a URL that you can use wherever, for example, http://twitter.com/adelemcalear/montrealers. Decide if you want the list public or private.

There is a new Lists drop down menu located beside the Tools menu. From the Lists drop down you can add people to any of your groups from their profile page or from your following list.

If you’ve been added to a list it will show up in a new Lists counter beside the number of following and followers you have. If you’ve added someone to a private list, it will not register on their counter.

When you click on the URL to someone’s list, you are given the single click option to “Follow This List.” According to How Twitter Lists Work, when you follow a list your following count does not increase, because “you don’t have to be following someone to add them to a list.”

When visiting someone’s profile page, you can click on their list counter under their bio to see which lists they have been included on and which they follow. (The Twitter url ends in /lists/membership.)

The Lists membership dashboard shows two tabs: Lists following you and Lists your are following. The Twitter user and name of list on the left side. On this page Following refers to how many people are included on the list. Followers refers to how many people have subscribed to the list.

If you want to view the lists that someone has created themselves, you will see a list of them in the right-hand side bar on that person’s profile page, right underneath their Favorites link. The lists  I followed showed up hear as well.

LIMITATIONS

While merrily starting out making my lists, it occurred to me that I might hit a limit. So I sought out the person I knew who would be trying his best to break the new feature, Robert Scoble. Sure enough, he’d found limits already.

It’s not yet clear if the limit of 20 lists includes created and subscribed to, or created only.

There were some  annoyances that came up in my brief test prior to writing this post.

At this time, you must add people individually to your lists, which could be quite time consuming if you follow a lot of people. It would be much faster if you could select multiple people from your following page and add them in bunches to lists.

There is no way of organizing the order in which your lists appear, either in the drop down menu when adding people or in the right-hand side bar of your profile page. The newest list is always on top, with the oldest at the bottom.

Also, and this has nothing to do with functionality, but the font style used on the individual list pages doesn’t match anything else in the Twitter brand. What can I say? I’m a marketer and for years I’ve worked with companies to build brands through consistency. I find it irritating and unprofessional for a company with $155 million in funding  to launch a new feature that doesn’t  seamlessly blend with the rest of their look and feel.

In Part 2 of this series I’ll look at the impact of Twitter Lists on desktop client applications, followers services and popularity ratings. Read Part 2: Twitter Lists: Developers and Applications

Part 3 will examine the effect of Twitter Lists on popularity.

Part 3 Part 4 will look at the opportunities that brands will have with Twitter Lists.

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