Energising Twitter lists
Twitter lists are under-utilised, buried under multiple layers of menu, and some people don't even know they exist. It's hardly surprising as Twitter doesn't seem to like them, reducing their visibility and apparent importance over the years.
Twitter's other client, Tweetdeck, provides good list support but has itself been all but forgotten having not been updated to support new features such as Moments.
I recently contributed to a discussion in which someone suggested they would find it useful having tweets from lists appear in their main stream.
Now, lists are designed to separate our experience into more manageable, more specific chunks enabling us to follow events or interests without needing to explicitly follow those users added to the lists.
Part of the benefit of lists is that our stream is not constantly overtaken by the tweets of those we may only want to see at certain times, but I can see some merit in being able to inject list tweets into our streams during these times enabling us to watch both.
How about a hybrid experience based on the operation of Moments?
Followed lists
Currently, we can follow a Live Moment for its duration and tweets from that Moment are inserted alongside those from the people whose tweets we have chosen to see.
To mirror this behaviour what if we could follow a list for a set period - perhaps an hour by default or for a user definable time - during which tweets from that list would be inserted into our main stream?
Tweets from Moments, that aren't from people we follow, are identified by way of a blue lightning bolt. Similarly, those tweets displayed by virtue of the list could be discerned in a similar way: when inserted into your stream, and not from someone you follow, tweets could have something like a blue list icon.
Unlikely
Any enhancements to lists would only occur if Twitter decided to, once again, make them a primary feature - unlikely based on current evidence.
Of course, this could change based on user behaviour, but we enter a catch-22 situation. List usage might increase with better visibility and enhancements but those changes would only be considered after an upwards trend in usage.
It's more likely that lists would be scrapped altogether.
