In an ideal world I would spend my Sundays enjoying strawberry mimosas at brunch with the Kardashian clan, shopping with my favorite social media influencers, and then fall asleep next to Liam Hemsworth. Well this isn’t my dream world, and I don’t know cool celebrities. Instead, my Sundays are generally spent watching my fiancé yell at the television while a football game is playing and I’m stuck scrolling through social media for something more entertaining. Well guess what? I can’t. Nothing is on my Twitter feed besides guys talking trash to one another about whatever just happened during “The Game”. My other friends generally stay off Twitter on Sundays because they don’t want to be reminded how boring football is. So that leaves me torn. Do I watch sweaty men fling a ball around or do I keep up with the trash talk about those players?
As of today, I no longer have this decision to make. Thank. God. Twitter finally upped its game and changed its lists feature to let users add up to five lists as alternative timelines. This means you can use lists to filter your timeline to dodge those annoying conversations and people you don’t want to see on your timeline. You can also use lists to follow a subset of people that you really want to focus on (i.e. celebrities, co-workers, your boyfriend’s friend group that you want to secretly keep tabs on). The feature allows you to swipe between the lists from the home screen. Twitter started testing this feature back in June and finally released it just in time for football season. Coincidence? I think not.
As with all of the regular rules of Twitter, these lists can be made either private or public. You are also able to follow public lists from other Twitter users and they are able to add you to lists as well. But what if you do not wish to be in someone’s list? Easy. Block them. Oh, and as for those people that you want to add to a list but don’t really like that much? Well this feature lets you add them to the list without making you follow them. This means you can get all of the information you are trying to suck out of them without giving them the pleasure of having you follow them. Savage.
The company released a tweet referring to the feature as “customizable timelines that are easy to access” and provided a short video of how the feature works. Another tweet from the company said, “Now on iOS, you can pin up to five lists, rearrange them, and swipe to access from home.” So simple. In addition to the new feature, Twitter also changed the design of list pages, which now includes header images, which makes it easier to see list members.
Lists have been around for years, but now this feature lets organization freaks like myself access these lists a lot easier. I love organizing people, places, etc. into different categories, and now this will make life so much easier. Thank you for that, Twitter. And living in a world with a crippling lack of non-sports tweets throughout all of September-February is no longer a reality that I will have to suffer through. There’s just so much to be thankful for and it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet.
