to measure the influence is tricky, but what “listing” option will provide is the ability to differentiate & look at the content (users grouping the content for the observer:P ), which could be helpful in finding potential influencers regarding specific topics.

For instance, if I care enough about my cigar-related contacts to create a related lists, I may want to stream that content somewhere. But where would I put it? Most likely, on a cigar-related site.

What Twitter has done is a great first step, but I think in order for these list widgets to become more popular, I the site developers must incorporate some sort of filter functionality into the lists.

Would love to know what you think, Brian.

This is a very cool and clever use of lists and gives people more of a reason to create and curate lists, especially lists of their own. I wonder if you could take anyones list and embed it in the widget or if it must be one of your own. If it were someone elses list and they choose to delete it or change the constiuents, name, etc. you are subject to the change. The widget could break if the list is deleted and in extreme circumstances the list could morph into something inappropriate for the site you embedded it on.

You are absolutely correct, lists will certainly factor into the calculation for influence but not all lists are equal in their influence. The number of followers someone has, as well as, the number of lists one is on, are both poor measures of influence for the simple reason that influence resides in context to presumed expertise – their domain of influence. There are domains of influence in which a person could be extremely influential and other domains of influence where they may have very little influence at all.

If you are interested I wrote and article about Twitter Lists, Power, and Influence: http://bit.ly/1glydV

Andrew Mueller

I've personally ramped up 30+ twitter accounts. All I'd have to do is create several lists from each account and list the account(s) that I wanted to establish as prominent. I could then add a few dozen other people to each list to make them look legitimate. I never would do that, but I’m sure many will.

Unfortunately, there is no quickie barometer of influence. The algorithms used by @Twitalyzer, @Klout, @TwitterGrader and other nascent analytics tools are still probably the best way to measure influence. They aren’t without their problems since they all emphasize different things and it’s not easy to figure out what’s being measured, but they’ll all get better as they prove their worth and migrate to paid business models.

In the meantime, most of us will just have to follow our gut and decide who we like.

PS
I’d love to send the word “curate” to the lingo same trash bin as “solutions.” But that’s just me.

@CarriBugbee
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