I saw a tweet this morning from @kim about a search engine for Twitter lists. It’s aptly named List Browser and was created by Dave Winer. For those of you that haven’t heard of Twitter lists yet, they’re a way of organizing the people that you follow. The hopes is that you will categorize your contacts into categories, thus allowing others to follow the list all with one click.
I posted a while ago about Twitter inadvertently delivering on the promise of niche social networks and how important the people are that I follow in helping me stay up to date on changes within the industry; a user generated RSS. (e.g. @kim spreading the word about a list search engine.)
The list functionality is going to help reduce the splintering that has been magnified lately by Twitter’s incredible popularity and increase it’s value as a niche social network enabler. I believe it will also help funnel niche specific information to any social network that is smart enough to plug into it’s API. (Hint: they all are.) This is also a step in the right direction if advertising is ever to be successful on Twitter. (That’s assuming they should monetize.) The generic era of advertising is dead (or at least dying). Advertising need to become smarter and relevant. If I know that 600 people on a list are interested in Puma shoes, I can sell advertising adjacent to the stream that is specific to that interest. In this scenario, it’s possible for me to charge roughly 4X the standard ad rate because I know the users.
The march for revenue continues.
