So Many Tools, So Many Lists
December 13 2009 11:30:00 AM
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Being able to organize the people you follow on Twitter into groups/categories/lists (whatever you want to call them) is one of the most useful ways to help process the flood of information that is shared via microblogging. I have lists for people at work, for family, for friends, etc. and this enables me to reads tweets in a way to works well for me. Up until Twitter's recent introduction of lists, each client (TweetDeck, Seesmic, and others) handled lists in their own way, meaning you had to recreate your groups in each tool. Now that Lists are a core feature of Twitter, they can be centrally managed and used across a variety of different Twitter clients.
Since I've not seen a "TweetDeck Group to Twitter List" conversion tool, what I've been doing is running columns side by side, one for the TweetDeck group I've been using, and a second for the new Twitter list I will be replacing it with. Visual inspection allows me to see when someone is missing from the Twitter list, and I then click on the person's photo, choose User - Add to group/list, and then select the Twitter list I want to add them to. After a few days of doing this, I had most of my new Twitter lists matching my old TweetDeck groups, and I was able to remove the TweetDeck columns. Now I can use those Twitter lists in several of the popular Twitter clients.
Ideally in the future Twitter profiles, along with Facebook, LinkedIn, and whatever cool tools pop-up in 2010+ will support industry standards which allow information to be shared not just across clients for the same tool, but even across different platforms. For example, I have a group in my Apple Address Book called "Toronto Tech Friends", which I use to send emails. Wouldn't it be nice if I could also have that same group be a list in Twitter, and a list in Facebook? Imagine being able to add someone in one place, and have them added to the others at the same time. Now that would be useful.
Since I've not seen a "TweetDeck Group to Twitter List" conversion tool, what I've been doing is running columns side by side, one for the TweetDeck group I've been using, and a second for the new Twitter list I will be replacing it with. Visual inspection allows me to see when someone is missing from the Twitter list, and I then click on the person's photo, choose User - Add to group/list, and then select the Twitter list I want to add them to. After a few days of doing this, I had most of my new Twitter lists matching my old TweetDeck groups, and I was able to remove the TweetDeck columns. Now I can use those Twitter lists in several of the popular Twitter clients.
Ideally in the future Twitter profiles, along with Facebook, LinkedIn, and whatever cool tools pop-up in 2010+ will support industry standards which allow information to be shared not just across clients for the same tool, but even across different platforms. For example, I have a group in my Apple Address Book called "Toronto Tech Friends", which I use to send emails. Wouldn't it be nice if I could also have that same group be a list in Twitter, and a list in Facebook? Imagine being able to add someone in one place, and have them added to the others at the same time. Now that would be useful.
