I am among a number of people who have had list functionality added as part of Twitter’s beta rollout of the new feature. Twitter is promoting the feature at the top of the home page with:

Lists are timelines you build yourself, consisting of friends, family, co-workers, sports teams, you name it. You’re part of a small group receiving this feature, so don’t tweet about it yet!

I know it says “don’t tweet about it,” but when I first saw the list function I was so excited I tweeted “Twitter’s new Lists feature is a breakthrough. It makes the service much more useful and will eliminate many annoying hashtags.” I was only partly right.

I held off writing about it since I respect embargoes, but so many others have violated the embargo I figure I’m no longer divulging any secrets, so here goes.

Twitter’s list function is great, but it doesn’t do everything I’d like it to. Here you can see how a list looks in the timeline.

Once you add people to a list, you can choose to look at tweets only from that list. This is very useful for communicating with employees of a certain company, or narrowing your timeline to people in a certain profession or geographic region.

For me, the thing that is missing in this iteration of the lists feature is the ability to publish a tweet to the list. Maybe one can do this, but I don’t see how. (I sent a request to Twitter about this.)

If you could have two-way conversations with a list, this would solve all the world’s problems and would make topic-specific Twitter chats, like those held by automotive enthusiasts and journalists, so much more rewarding for the participants while removing them from the timeline of those who aren’t interested.

Similarly, this would be a huge improvement in the interface for live tweeting. People interested in an event could join a list and then could watch and participate in a closed environment. Not only would this be cleaner for all, it would eliminate the need for annoying hashtags for these kinds of applications.

Of course this would lead to more complex features (or maybe a professional features superset that Twitter could sell) like list management tools, list invites, public and private lists, etc.

A couple of other things that need to be ironed out:

• it takes a long time to add someone to a list, up to seven seconds for me
• the user interface for adding people is inconsistent; sometimes you see a checkbox when you have successfully added a person and other times you don’t, so there is not consistent confirmation of an add
• as you can see above, I created a list with 70 people from the Santa Cruz area; the page says I am following 70 and none of them are following me back, but in reality, over 60 of these people are following me back; none of them have subscribed to my list however, so they are not following the list even though they are following me; this is a little confusing and maybe Twitter needs different language, like “subscribers” and “subscribed” for this.

Watch for more from Twitter. The lists feature, with a few refinements, unlocks so many business and professional applications for the service, and fully implemented, is a real threat to Yammer, Presently and other “alternative” microblogging environments.

Tags: Twitter, lists, hashtags, live, tweeting, microblogging, Presently, Yammer