Twitter recently announced a new feature on their website. This feature allows users to organize the people they find interesting on Twitter in so-called “lists”. The twitter list function shows up at the top of your account page providing easy access to create your own lists.  Users can create multiple lists for different purposes, a list of friends, artists or just a list of their favorites brands.

If you click on the list, it will only show tweets from the people you put in that the list. Maybe you were was expecting that this function will let you control which people can read my tweets, but that’s not the case. Twitter lists let you organize how you can more selectively read tweets posted by people on your list. You can select what list you want to read instead of reading your whole stream.

Twitter has chosen to keep the lists separate from your followers.  In other words, you do not have to follow someone to add him/her to a list that you create. You can also remove your name from any list you don’t want to be on. If someone adds you to a list you don’t want to be on, you can block that user and you automatically remove yourself from the list.

Lists can be public or private. If you choose them to be public you are sharing your list with the world, if you set it to private, only you can use it. Twitter lists can also be used to create widgets from a specific list allowing you to post them on your blog or social network site.  Basically, twitter lists are a new way to group and share people you find interesting. Currently users can’t exceed 20 lists with a maximum of 500 tweople.

Companies or brands can create multiple lists based on specific users with requested backgrounds or topics. The list feature is a powerful marketing tool for research and live search of people’s reactions to product releases, events or general feedback about anything. This was a prominent feature that a lot of people were asking for.

Considering that these twitter lists are linked from your personal account, there is a great possibility that users who are regular viewers of your activity will be introduced to new and exciting twitter accounts that you are following and feature within a list. You could help your friends follow funny or interesting Twitter users that they were previously unaware of!

In the past, users have recommended Twitter accounts to follow by tweeting the user name with the tag ‘#followfriday’ every Friday. Each week on this day the tag tops the list of Twitter Trending Topics. However, now with the invention of the list feature, this tag may become less popular as friends can simply look at your lists to discover new accounts worth following. If you need to see an example of a twitter list, the Twitter team that developed this feature has created a list showcasing all of their activity that can be seen at http://twitter.com/twitter/team. This is a great way for the people at Twitter to stay connected through this list and read each other’s status updates quickly, without sorting through hundreds of other feeds they are subscribed to. You can link your own job’s member accounts together in a list and share it on the company website.

You can even feature your Twitter lists on your own website or on your favorite social networking sites by utilizing the Twitter List Widget (http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_list). Simply fill out your information on the Twitter List Widget page and the site will produce the proper HTML code that you can embed on your own personal or business site to share your list.