Crooks.net

For a long time now, I’ve used two Twitter accounts, @scrooks and @drthunder, to manage my Twitter life.  The reason I initially created two accounts is now moot, but over time I discovered that it worked a lot better for me to have a “personal” account, @scrooks, with people that I know in real life, and a “follower” account, @drthunder, where I watched people I didn’t really know but found interesting.  This made for a clear separation of tweet updates.  The @scrooks account got less traffic and I read 100% of it.  The @drthunder account got more traffic but I didn’t really care if I got busy and missed some of it at times.

But there was still something unsatisfying about this.  Twittelator makes it easy to bounce between two accounts, but it still wasn’t appealing.  And there were times when I wanted to respond to someone I followed on the @drthunder account and most of the time I wanted that response to really come from what I considered my real account, @scrooks.

Then Twitter lists came along and Twittelator has made them useful enough I have shifted all my Twittering over to my @scrooks account.

This is what Twittelator looks like:

The middle of the screen is my Twitter timeline, with a custom skin for the colors and font.  You can see that my tweet is in a slightly different shade to make it stand out.  Along the bottom are buttons to see the timeline, any tweets where I’m mentioned, direct messages, and – the subject of this post – my lists.  (The bottom buttons are configurable from amongst the many you see if you tap on “More”.)

Here’s the screen I see if I tap on “My Lists”:

Here you see the top of my list of lists.  While you can create lists directly in Twittelator, in my case I did it using the Twitter web interface.  I’ve divided people into different lists because reading tweets together that are in the same general category is easier on my brain.  And here’s the important part:  I don’t actually follow (in an official Twitter sense) nearly anyone in these lists.  This means that their tweets don’t show up in my main timeline.  I reserve my main timeline for those people I deem most important to follow, which is nearly exclusively people I know in real life.  The secondary effect of this is that I can have Boxcar, an iPhone app that alerts me when new tweets appear in my timeline, not send me alerts about tweets I don’t really care about.  If I’m in a hurry I can just pop into my main timeline in Twittelator, quickly read the new tweets (which Twittelator makes easy to do), and ignore anything in my Twitter lists.

If I have more time I can catch up on the tweets in my Twitter lists.  This is what things look like if I tap on the “Technology People” list:

When the list opens it is refreshed with new tweets.  Note the “(8)” in the title bar.  This is the number of new, unread tweets.  This number is what makes lists actually useful.  The list opens where I last left off reading, so as I scroll the screen up I will see all the new tweets in chronological order.  I can reply or retweet or email or copy or whatever any of these tweets, just like the tweets in my main timeline.  But remember, I said I am not actually following any of these people.  It’s a clean separation, just like I used to have with my @drthunder account.  But now I can essentially have as many accounts (lists) as I want using logical groupings.  This is fantastic.

When I hit a period where I have a few minutes, I just skip from list to list reading all the new tweets (if any) and I’m quickly caught up on things.  If my life gets too busy I can still easily stay caught up on my main timeline and let the lists languish.  Or maybe keep up with one or two of the more important lists and ignore the rest (a nice benefit to being able to categorize people). If a list has had a lot of traffic while I’m gone and I miss some, so be it.  If I really wanted to I could always load in everything I missed.

It’s also easy to start following for real anyone on one of these lists with two finger taps.  Or move someone that I already follow to a list and stop following them.  Or move someone to a different list.  Or remove someone from the list.   Twittelator has a lot of power for doing these kinds of things.  That’s part of the reason I use it nearly exclusively for my Twitter life – I don’t even have a Twitter client installed on my computer.

I mentioned before that you can follow lists that other people have made public.  That can be seen on this screen:

These are a few lists I follow that other people created.  They maintain the list, adding and removing people as they desire.  For something like the “Official Cerner Accounts” this is fantastic, because I don’t have to worry about tracking anything.  The list is always up-to-date (assuming the list owner keeps it that way) with the correct accounts.  As far as reading and tweeting, these lists behave exactly the same as lists I created myself.

To summarize, here’s what I like about Twitter lists and Twittelator:

But all is not perfect yet.  Here are some problems that still exist: