I’ve ranted about Twitter lists a number of times. In the early days it was a cool way to group and promote your friends. Then Formulists came along and created the AUTO-CRAP-TWITTER-LIST that adds everybody to everybody else’s list. Auto-lists suck. Okay, point: Formulist’s auto-list feature has trashed the Twitter List function. Now look at the way the New Twitter shows Lists, if you can find them.

NAV: Profile: Lists: Member of

Profile: Lists: Member of

But a funny thing has been removed. Twitter no longer reports how many Twitter Lists have me as a member. It used to be a signal of authority, now it’s just Formulists junk. So, I think that’s good, actually, making the gaming of Lists less important.

But the Subscribed To Lists reporting seems to have been broken for months. Here’s the screen you get.

I have not gotten this "subscribed to" list to ever load since the redesign. Ho hum.

NOW FAVORITES.

It used to be, in the early days, that favorites or FAVS were a way of discovering new people to follow, people who were funny, people who had great things to say. And you could discover some of these people the FAV sites that did nothing but re-promote "faved" tweets. I don’t know if they still exist. Because the FAV function began to get spammy and gamed by the aggressive-growth-focused tweeters.

NOW, NEW TWITTER’S [email protected] PAGE brings the FAVORITE back into the accessible functions of Twitter.

Now you can see who followed you, who added you to a list (still not that interesting to me) and who retweeted or favorited your tweets.

So we lost a useful function a while ago (LISTS) and got an old function back (FAVORITES). I’d rather have Formulists kicked off Twitter Lists for good, but until that happens, FAVORITES is the NEW RETWEET. Or at least an additional ReTweet type of recognition of good tweets.

And ultimately that’s what we are looking for, good tweets. People who take care to communicate and respond using Twitter.

Respect the Tweet, Ban the Bots, Cage the Trolls, and Kill the Auto-DM.

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)

permalink: https://uber.la/2012/01/lists-favorites/

See the Google Tools page & the Facebook Tools page and these other Google Posts:

• Why Google+ Is Not Competing Against Facebook; The Google+ Platform Play
• The Most Important Social Technology – Going Global w/ Google Hangouts
• Google+ Circles: Understanding Your Public vs Private Social Networks
• One Google+ Extension To Rule The Stream; An Essential Micro-Review for Google+
• Problem with Google+; The STREAM is Too Fast – Filter the Stream or Pause the Stream

And some selected Twitter posts from The Twitter Way page:

• The Problem with Twitter.com; Why Are Tweeters Dropping Like Flies?
• The Twitter Bubble; Don’t Let Your Followers Fool You Into Feeling Influential
• Signal to Noise Ratio on Twitter: Trying to Find Meaning & Losing Friends
• How to Get Useful Business Information Out of Twitter: Hashtags for Social Media Research
• Bogus Posts Starting to Show Up in Social Marketing Channels (New Twitter Spam)
• The Social Sharing Golden Rule: "And What Excites You About That?"
• Twitter Exploded and Examined, Part 1
• How @formulists Killed the Value of the Twitter LIST
• TrueTwit Is Twitter Spam