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| You're invited in. |
Twitter is a strange beast. A brilliant one, sure, but strange all the same. When you first sign up to the site you are encouraged to do one thing and one thing alone: follow people. You do that by clicking on some ticks next to pictures of famous faces and suddenly you're following lots of celebrities and trusted voices whose opinion you probably don't care about but you're paying attention to anyway, because Twitter told you to. As you become more involved with Twitter you end up following even more people, either because you've stumbled across them, you have a genuine interest in what they do or, most likely, they followed you first. Soon enough you're following hundreds of people who all do hundreds of different things and your news feed is a bustling hive of social activity, which is nice, but it can lead to some difficulties, difficulties I have found myself experiencing quite recently.
I was noticing that, when on Twitter, I was spending a hell of a lot of time scrolling. I wasn't scrolling with an enthusiasm to find out more information; I was scrolling to try and get through all of the junk. I didn't care about 90% of what the people I followed were saying 90% of the time. I didn't care about their blogs (guilty) or their Instagram photos or there political views during Question Time and these were filling up the majority of my screen. But I didn't want to just stop following them, because the chances are I will care about something they say eventually, something they post will engage my brain long enough for me to click on it and read more, and I'm a firm believer that the more ideas you absorb the better your own ideas will become.
What I was left with was an option I'd never really understood the need for before: Twitter lists. Here's where we come back to Twitter being strange again, because really Twitter is just a list in the first place. You list people you want to follow, some other people list you and you're provided with a list of things you might want to look at. To offer a feature to further segment those lists always struck me as odd, but suddenly the necessity became strikingly clear. Now I can filter through the rubbish and read things I want to read without offending anyone by telling them to do one. The people's blogs I do enjoy are all put in a nice little bundle, the folk who work in a similar field to me are all placed in a copywriting club so I can dip in and out and STEAL THEIR IDEAS. AHAHAHA. And, perhaps most importantly of all, the people I actually know who do things that might impact my real, offline existence are all together too so I can crash all of the parties they plan without telling me.
Life is a lot simpler now. I think this list thing might be the future.