So now that Twitter Lists are (apparently) officially live, the impact upon the Twitter-verse will be obvious soon enough. To wit:

The oft-requested “Follow me on Twitter” plea will be superseded by “List me on Twitter”.

Count on it. With auto-populating sites and services making thousands-count “following” and “followers” tallies fairly meaningless, getting listed will be perceived as more intimate, and therefore more relevant.

It doesn’t matter how true this is or isn’t, especially once automation hits the lists metric — the early perception will be what counts. Ultimately, lists are nothing more than filters, built-into the service instead of achievable through TweetDeck or other clients. They’ll further devalue the following/follower numbers, and give numbers-gawkers something else to track. That’s the extent of it.

I was among the chosen few to whom Twitter gave early-access list-making. Can’t say why — I’m far from the most prolific tweeter out there. In fact, I’ve gotten fairly bored with the site, and have let my usage revert mostly to my original purpose: To push out auto-tweet links to updates on this blog. I was intrigued enough to create a single list, but don’t see going through the trouble of sifting through my followers list to create more (although I’ve discovered that you don’t need to follow someone to list them — a curious feature/quirk). Personally, I’d rather that the Twitter braintrust had rolled out the much-awaited built-in retweet function before this.