Twitter Lists, Twitter’s first strike against clients?
Posted on 19. Oct, 2009 by benmckenna in All Posts, Apps, Twitter
Interesting developments from Twitter with the recent announcement of the release of their Lists beta feature. For those of you with enough of a life not to care about these things, lists is a feature currently only available to “selected users” that allows you to select lists of your favourite Tweeters. So what form will these lists actually take? Early indications from the beta, which in case you are wondering I havent been invited to join yet *hem hem*, seem to have them as an extra tab on your right-side navigation area along with your @ and DMs. It also appears that lists will be publicly available information, much in the same way that your followers/people you follow are. You can also follow whole lists by bulk, which is nice.
Though it may only seem like a little change at this point but throughout their meteoric rise Twitter have been almost wilfully ignorant of the user experience through twitter.com barring some recent small, incremental improvements. Twitter’s main tactic has been one of instead opening their API up early and well and this has allowed a healthy ecosystem of third party apps, among them clients, to flourish instead. Now with lists, something that’s obviously outside the core functionality of Twitter, comes the time to ask whether this move is just a user experience upgrade of if this is a concerted effort to regain some of the territory lost to Twitter clients.
I’ve blogged a couple of times before about Twitter clients and the fact that they are absolutely essential to make using Twitter an enjoyable experience. The latest statistics indicate that roughly only 25% of people actually use twitter.com, it’s an incredible statistic if you pause to think about it for a minute. Three quarters of people using your services dont even touch your webpage actually never visit your site, using an API and third party client app. As someone with a fair bit of background in web1.0 (where traffic is king and driving traffic is an art form) it’s just impossible to fully rationalise that stat, at least without a little shake of my head and a roll of my eyes.
From the traffic side alone it would make sense to improve the “in browser” functionality of Twitter but also, even though Twitter is booming the current state of play isnt exactly ideal. People I know have tried Twitter and been turned off by the basic functionality (or lack thereof) and subsequently have not been enthused enough to bother with downloading a client. Could it therefore be the case that Twitter want to up their conversion rates for sign ups? Are they planning to advertise and want to funnel more traffic through the service? Maybe they just want to mature a bit as a service and taking back a little control helps to do that. Either way, a reliable web based client would be great.
It’ll be interested to see where they go next from here.
Lists Beta Released to More Users 1 day ago
To further test our beta Lists feature, we’ve introduced it to a larger group of users.
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