Twitter adds the possibility of organizing feeds into topic lists. Pandia tests the feature.

Twitter is already a useful search and research tool. The social microblog site has a decent search engine that lets you do real time searches in the topics people are interested in right now.

Finding the unknown unknown

However, for journalists and other intelligence gatherers another factor may be more important: If you subscribe to the most knowledgeable twitterers in your field, you will get access to top news you didn’t know you should have searched for.

If you are interested in search engines, for instance, experts like Danny Sullivan may feed you the very latest news. Pandia provides a feed that gives you the latest search engine news from this site.

The problem is that if you use Twitter to follow a large number of topics — or you follow a large number of people — your Twitter home page may become flooded with irellevant entries or tweets.

Group your tweeps

Now Twitter is testing a feature that will help you solve this problem. Some “tweeps” or twitter users have gotten a new feature on their Twitter page that lets them set up lists on a particular topic.

I have now the ability to sort the people I am following into several lists, one for each of my favorite topic, being that on search engines, science and technology or research and innovation policy.

Now that I have this option, I will probably also look for twitter users covering others of my favorite topics as well, from mythology to science fiction.

Easy to set up

The lists are easy to set up. Click on a link on the home page, give your list a name and add twitterers to your list by using a tab that appears next to their profile.

You can even add people you are not following yourself, which is a little bit confusing. Unfollowing someone does not mean that you have removed them from your list.

The lists will publish all the tweets of the twitterers you have added to the list.

My own search engine intelligence list

If you are one of those who have got the new list feature, you may take a look at my Search Engine Intelligence list, where I have gathered some of the best search engine oriented twitterers.

If you subscribe to that list you will get a steady stream of search engine relevant tweets to your Twitter account, without having to follow these twitterers yourself.

See also: Twitter Lists 101

photo credit: moonjazz