One of my recent tweets was,
No more ‘How many you have?’. Its time for ‘How many have you?.
Of course, its about twitter’s latest and greatest in massages – ego massage, that is – The Twitter List!
It’s a brilliantly sneaky ploy, since lists have been in existence for quite some time now – thanks to third-party apps. But the one critical ingredient that makes this list successful is – obviously – the tight integration. So, you can see who thinks highly of you and what they think of you; who’s in your league, in the opinion of an assorted group of people, besides basic details like how many people consider you worth something.
All this reminds me of a Seinfeld episode – for the detail-devils, the 154th episode, titled The Millennium. Besides a great joke involving Newman’s millennium party, to be called Newmanium, one of the sub-plots involved Seinfeld getting caught in a messy war between his girlfriend and her stepmother. The war is about who has Jerry’s number in a higher rank in their telephone speed dial. As you know, there are only 9 speed dial places in any phone, including your mobile phone, but Seinfeld is obsessed with his increasing ranking among the 2 women, in a very…well, Seinfeld’ish way. Eventually, the step mother takes him to a new high, by placing his number in one of the emergency speed dials, which is incidentally meant for poison control!
What happens as a result is best seen and not read in this blog, but the point is the glaring similarity between the way people may end up using twitter list and the way Seinfeld imagined the use of the telephone speed dial. There are quite a few blog posts already about innovative uses of twitter lists and I agree with the thought behind most of them – but at the bottom of it, it is a fantastic way to categorize people (if you’ve not done that already, in your mind!) and let those people and the rest of the world know about such categorization.