We all know Twitter is where ADHD, stalking, and narcissism meet. There's even a t-shirt. If the social messaging service was cocaine, however, last week it became crack. Lists, a new feature introduced last week, concentrates the qualities that make Twitter so addictive.
The new feature allows users to create lists of users whose tweets they want to follow. The feature has only amplified the drive to gather followers for a user's feed, with users competing to create widely followed lists.
Users, meanwhile, benefit from the vanity-fueled listmaking frenzy, getting the ability to select from millions of useful lists with a single click. Over the weekend a clever bit of Googling by blogger Alex Wilhelm revealed that more than 6 million lists have already been created.
There are risks, however. One risk: the more features Twitter piles onto its service, the greater the risk Twitter could become like Google Reader. The search engine's service, which gathers and aggregates RSS feeds, is absurdly useful. It also packs so many clever features that many some users have simply given up on the increasingly complex service.
So far, Twitter has been cautious, leaving the job of piling on major new features to the third party companies offering services built around access to Twitter's Appliation Programming Interfaces. That's smart. If Twitter wants to make money from its growing user base, however, it will have to make the simple, elegant service more complex. Last week, at least, it proved it could do so successfully at least once.--Brian Caulfield
