For too long now people have been obsessed with the numbers game on Twitter. How many people are following you? How many do you follow? Are you committing the ultimate sin of following more people than follow you? This is a game played mostly by people who don’t see that the real power is in the power of networking with all sorts of people. The killer business contact could come from somebody with only a handful of followers.

News that Twitter has just launched it’s list feature (see a great review here) is a welcome relief for those who realize the numbers game is a fruitless venture. The new and more definitive way of finding who is influential and worth following on Twitter…The amount of lists they are on. Now there is no doubt that people will try and game this feature just as much as other features but essentially somebody consistently appearing on “top technology” lists will have been deemed an influential person within the technology sector not by somebody writing a top 50 list on a blog but by an aggregated combination of his peers. You won’t be able to come in as a newbie and spam, click on the follow button or write a script to appear on the lists, you will be put on lists by people who think your content is valuable and of use to others.

A new popularity race has just started on Twitter and luckily this time you won’t be able to manually bump your chances but instead you will just have to writ really great content, be respected in your field or be seen as influential. This is the feature that could really take Twitter to a whole new level, very exciting indeed.

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