I spotted an interesting blog post about twitter lists from a site called Formulists a few weeks ago, so I started following them on twitter.
Last week all their followers received an invite to do a little Alpha testing with the tool.
As always with a new tool, I couldn’t resist seeing what it had to offer. I clicked on the link, signed up and started to play. I didn’t know that it would lead me somewhere so interesting.
Formulists builds Twitter list for you. For more about Twitter lists see this Twitter lists guide from Mashable.
Formulists doesn’t do a massive amount, and it doesn’t do a massive amount that is completely new. But it does what it does excellently. Its user interface is very good – at no point was it unclear how to use. Everything seems to do exactly what it says on the tin and to top it all off, it looks really pretty too.
It will create all sorts of lists for you. Like a “recent interactions” list, that one is similar to the conversationlist one that you might have seen some people using. It builds the list based upon who you have interacted with on Twitter in a given time period. To get on my “recent interactions” list we need to have had three interactions in the last 14 days. This seems to generate a list of between 20 and 30 of my closest twitter pals.
There are already lots of services that will tell you who out of your following doesn’t follow you back. Formulists will turn this into a list for you. This really interested me, not because I am particularly worried about whether or not people return my follow, but because I was intrigued to see how people would react to being put on a list like that. I hit the button to create the list and chose to make it public.
I half assumed it would be like all other lists – that no one would really notice, I’d delete it in a few weeks and forget all about it. The next morning though, at least 10 folks off the list had started following me. I shrugged – this wasn’t a negative response as I had worried.
A couple of days later a twitter user from the list sent me a Direct Message asking me about it. He didn’t understand why I thought he should follow me. I explained about the experiment, that I thought I probably wouldn’t keep the list and that I appreciated his comments. We had a nice exchange of DMs but he ultimately decided that he didn’t want to follow me long term.
I had five people tweet me openly about the list – some positive, some not sure how to react and some just interested.
All in all I can attribute 20 new followers to the creation of the list. I’m not all that worried about my follower count but it does make me realise that people do look at what lists they are added to and who has listed them.
I have been fairly blown away by this simple list – I’ve never had so much reaction to listing before – and I create my fair share of lists (not all of them public, of course)!
The question is: Do I keep the list, or do I chalk up the experiences and delete it? After all, I think it’s fairly confrontational and it gives the wrong impression - I think Twitter’s easy opt-in, opt-out, no pressure vibe is one of it’s biggest strengths… It has been a great conversation starter though…
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