Twitter Lists are a great way to organize the people you’d like to follow, and we’re confident in saying that TweetAgora has one of the best implementations of Lists around. For some cases however, using an Agora can be a better fit. Here’s a quick overview of the advantages of using a Twitter List vs using an Agora in TweetAgora:
Lists
• Synchronized on Twitter’s cloud & native to (most) 3rd party clients
• Can be public or private
• In TweetAgora v2, you can sort your Lists by relevance & see what’s trending in them (using the newly integrated Cadmus service)
Agoras
• Can be used to bring any number of Lists, people, or keywords together in one dynamic stream. So rather than scanning multiple Lists, people, and keywords related to a topic, you can get everything in one place, ordered chronologically.
• Adding people to an Agora results in seeing more information than if you added those same people to a List. Whereas Lists only show people’s public tweets & tweets sent to other members of that List, Agoras show ALL tweets from the people that have been added (meaning they also include comments to other people). This can be a great way to discover new people based on who members of your Agora are talking to.
• You will always see tweets from everyone who has been added to an Agora. Say you add two people to a List: Chatty Cathy & Quiet Quincy (you can guess what their tweeting characteristics are like). To see tweets from Quiet Quincy, you’d have to go through all of Chatty Cathy’s tweets. If those same two people were added to an Agora, you’d see just as many tweets from Quiet Quincy as you do from Chatty Cathy.
• Agoras can be used to keep tabs on a person’s activities. By adding a person to an Agora, and their @ name as a keyword, you can see all of their tweets combined with all tweets sent to them.
• For power users like Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) who feel limited by Twitter’s 500 person List limit, Agoras can be a great solution. By merging multiple mega-Lists into one Agora, Twitter’s 500 person limit on Lists can be overcome!
These are just a few of the ways that Lists & Agoras can be used – how do YOU use them? Let us know in the comments.