I should really stay off Twitter. I get into a lot of trouble when I go on Twitter.
When I say trouble, I mean I get ideas for projects. When I say trouble, I mean getting an urge to build something. Why is that trouble? There are only 24 hours in a day, and the 8 hours I should be sleeping drops to 3 or 4.
Last weekend Matt Mazzeo tweeted about Twitter Lists.
Read the whole Tweet storm, it’s very good!
Finding people to follow, even just experts in a particular area can be very difficult. I usually end up looking for blog posts on the subject, but Matt is right. Twitter has a great features in lists that can solve this very problem.
Twitter does a horrible job surfacing these lists, and even makes creating and managing them pretty hard. The fact that people take the time to build them, only enhances their value.
I’ve been on a bit of kick of building Leaderboards lately. 3 of them for Product Hunt (500Makers, 500Hunters, 500Products) and 2 for Medium (TopPub, TopAuthors) and 1 for Dribbble (TopShots). So why not create one for Twitter?
TopLists is born!
To be included in TopLists a list must have at least 1 follower, and have at least 2 members (it’s not list with one member right?). The lists with the most subscribers appears first. Simple.
The Twitter API, or more specifically the rate limits that Twitter imposes makes building TopLists more difficult than it needs to be, but I’ll work around them for now.
I’ve included a way to search TopLists (thanks Algolia), being able to find a list using keywords is an important part of the problem that people have with Twitters lists.
I’d love to do more with the lists, to make them easier for users to build and manage, however the limits imposed by the Twitter API would make this difficult. But first things first, lets see if people like what I’ve built so far, and then I can decide what to do next.
So, tell me what you think below, leave a comment!
