1000th tweet, and twitter lists
I am about to hit my 1000th tweet and I haven’t really been sure what to say to mark this momentous occasion. Although “i like turtles” was in the running, I decided to just announce this post.
Ah Twitter. I made the mistake early on of setting my account to private and I think I scared off a lot of would-be friends (the term “followers” really bothers me, btw) and got myself wrapped up in a world of imaginary follow/unfollow/privacy/prying-eyes internal conflict crazy that was totally unnecessary considering I wasn’t tweeting anything that wasn’t common knowledge in the first place. Late last year I realized I was being stupid, and I unlocked everything. It’s totally paid off: I’m still finding many friends, new and old.
About a month ago I discovered lists (I know, late to the party again). Someone had added me to their list called “Who-My-Friends-Talk-To”. I was so thrilled to have been added to a list, and how cool was it that she was keeping track of who her friends talk to? That takes some serious dedication! I didn’t figure it out until someone else added me to another list of the same name, but it turns out she was using a service called Formulists and I was added automatically based on the interactions of her friends. I still thought it was pretty cool and created one for myself too.
When I have a little downtime, I can always find a new friend by reading my “where-my-friends-at” list (hah, see what I did there?) and adding people I find interesting. Even better, I can count at least five people who have added me as a friend as a result of their being in the list. That totally takes the pressure off of me — and trust me, I can overthink following/not-following someone until my brain runs in circles and conks out with a blankie.
Formulists isn’t just for friends-of-friends lists, it’s got a ton of other lists you can create too. I created one for my fan site that includes people who follow the topic’s official accounts, filtered by recent tweets so only the 500 most active people are included. It’s definitely high-volume — not too readable or followable — but it does give my site some exposure as the curator of the list. It also brings in an average of 1 new follower a day.
My favorite Formulists list so far is a custom list I created by culling a whole mess of other lists and filtering by my location, Columbia Maryland. I thought I was pretty clever in creating this one, but it turns out the Formulists blog already covered the topic of finding locals on Twitter months ago!
I created my columbia-maryland list to find more local people, because only a small number of locals were using the county hashtag. I was so pleased to find that Columbia is full of unique and interesting people, business and organizations — and my list is always a hyper-local snapshot of what’s happening right now. Flash mob at the mall? Check. Snowstorms? Check. Ravens lose? Check. The list is self-generating and auto-updating, so after the initial time spent giving it lists to filter, maintenance ends up to be relatively little work on my part.
The drawback, for me, is that the location filtering doesn’t account for the iPhone/UT latitude, longitude location that so many people seem to have. (There’s got to be a way to do this. Anyone know?)
I’d love to cull the list down even further to include only people, but there’s no way to do it automatically and my little Columbia list isn’t anywhere near its max of 500, so for now it stands as-is, containing non-private Twitter users in Columbia who have tweeted recently: businesses, organizations, and individuals alike.
If you’re in Columbia and aren’t on the list but want to be, please let me know @allura. The easiest way is to change your location in your profile to Columbia, MD, follow me (I promise my tweets aren’t ALL about snow), and make sure you’re tweeting regularly.
If you get a chance to check out Formulists, let me know if you come up with any other cool ways to use it. And if you have any ideas about the latitude/longitude filtering, let’s chat.