If you’re in New York on November 5th, or just want a great workshop, we’re doing a training on Social Media – Planning Strategy, Monitoring & Measuring Your Way to Success as a part of Search Engine Strategies’ SEM Training New York: Full or Half Day Workshops.

We’ll take you beyond the fundamentals of understanding just what social media is. If you’ve got the grasp of what Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Linked In all are, then you are ready for the next step. That next step is all about Strategy, Monitoring and Measuring.

Twitter recently started a beta feature called “Lists”. It basically allows you to create a customized “list” of people to “follow” just like you normally “follow” a person. For instance if you wanted to keep up to date on Twitter company updates you could check out the twitter team list at http://twitter.com/twitter/team.
(Its only  available to those that are part of the beta.) It’s a lot like a news feed, and there’s currently similar personal functionality in tweetdeck, i.e. of creating a sort of customized column of people to follow without actually following them, although it lacks the ability to share.

When you create a list it’s added to your URL e.g. twitter.com/username/mylist and you can have both public and private lists (although both public and private lists currently require you to login).

In its current state you can add anyone on twitter to a list whether you follow them or not.  And you can put any one person in multiple lists.

There’s also now a “listed” count so that you can see how many public “lists” have “listed” you. You can also “follow” a list as demonstrated by the button in the screenshot above (take a look at the upper left corner for a “Follow this List” button).

I expect this will deflate some of the high follow counts as people begin to segment those they follow into “lists” i.e. following friends but using lists to keep up on news or sports or business contacts. Will this then segment followers into more of a “friends” category and “listers” (“listeds”?) into an “acquaintance” or “non-personal” category. Or will those with high “listed” counts be more respected than those with high follow counts, because people wanted to share those they “listed”?  Also will this bring a new power user to twitter, not those who tweet well, but those who can make killer lists of people who tweet well?  Will twitter become a microcosm of what’s already happened on the web i.e. a shift from content creators to content distributors?