Service or Twitter pollution? @formulists

2 comments General, Tools, Twitter

Nov 20

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Admittedly there is far more noise than signal on Twitter unless you stay inside your lists – which I often do. Lists have, for the most part, been sort of a rescue for users of the Twitter website. We who use tools like Tweetgrid, Seesmic, Hootsuite, or another third party solution to engage on Twitter likely did not notice when a new Twitter application called @formulists showed up.

In short Formulists, “is a list creation and management tool that allows users to effortlessly generate dynamic and personalized Twitter lists that continuously self-update. Formulists-generated lists can be viewed or deleted from any Twitter client and will continue to self-update without the need to return to the Formulists website.” That from their website.

In longer form @formulists is, as are many tools, mostly loved and by a minority disdained. Their reasoning is usually similar:

Question about @formulists by @UnicornRW

There are many tweets about @formulists but it was a negative one which first caught my eyes, “@formulists I’d like to be removed from your lists. I think they artificially inflate the number of lists I’m on and I’d prefer that to stop” from @BJMendelson that caught my eyes. Although I had previously seen @formulists I had not given them much attention. Controversy sparks interest, yes indeed!

When it gets down to it there are people who claim to be purists, not saying Brandon or Rebecca are in this category, who are in fact just snobs and selectively despise the way Twitter is used.

So the question, as the title implied, is “do you find @formulists (in particular) to be some sort of noise just adding to the clutter on Twitter or do you find it as a useful tool to help you manage your followers?”

It seems one easy fix to stop the vituperating would be to allow users to opt-out of being included in the lists. Why? Because they want to. As for me – list away!

Here’s an open invitation for any one of the fine people from @formulists to join us on Social Media Edge radio (click to contact) and help people catch the vision of your service.

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  • http://courtneyengle.com Courtney Engle

    Thanks for the link. I prefer to keep some of my Formulists private, and others public. By being selective, I keep the clutter down and my lists fairly clean. Many don’t bother with this though.

    • Ken

      I have not started a list but I did have a thought of using one of the lists like people who follow me but I don’t follow them to notify me of people who may have recently followed me. I’m still not sure or sold on it but it looks like we’ll have someone from @Formulists on the show (http://socialmediaedge.com) to help us all better understand and use the tool as it was originally intended and to find better ways to use it, too.