New: Save Twitter Lists Interactively Created with TweetPivot

Feedback from some newcomers to TweetPivot ran along the lines of:

"cool use of technology that's of interest to the curious looking for insights into their twitterverse"

However, when they were asked to explain how they would use these insights, pausing and head-scratching ensued. We believe that, with the new ability to save twitter lists, we are a step closer to making TweetPivot a useful, reusable tool...

Many Twitter users recognise that building up highly-customised Twitter lists is a great route to managing the firehose of Twitter information and maximising the relevance of updates they receive. However, it is time-consuming to build a custom list one person at a time, and simply adopting a large list from another Twitter user may leave you drowning in tweets. TweetPivot can help by making it easy to interactively chop down existing lists to increase their relevance. New functionality allows you to save the results as a custom Twitter list to be picked up by your favourite Twitter client.

If you've already tried TweetPivot, then you'll know that it enables you to interactively explore friends, followers and lists for any unprotected Twitter account and graphically identify a subset of people based on criteria such as location and influence (as measured by Klout). In the latest release of TweetPivot you can now save the results of your pivot exploration as a Twitter list.

To give it a go:

1. Go to the TweetPivot website
2. Pick a Twitter account of interest
3. Pivot its friends, followers or one of its lists
4. Interactively select a subset of interesting people
5. Save as a new list
6. Receive relevant tweets in Twitter or your favorite Twitter client

Follow @TweetPivot for updates, including an announcement of a upcoming video of how to use the new functionality.

TweetPivot goes Interactive!

We published a new feature today that has gotten us very excited at TweetPivot. Tanya Morton will be publishing a post later today that discusses more of the benefits but, for now, here's the mechanics.

Over the past few weeks thousands of people have been using our software to investigate collections of twitter users; but it's been a read-only process. Now, once you've found a subset of interesting users, we'll allow you to save them 'en masse' to one of your Twitter Lists.

This does require that you grant us access to your Twitter account but I've already blogged about what we will and won't do with that trust here.

This is what the new interface looks like - note the new button at the top 'Save Users to a Twitter List'. I've already filtered the collection so that it just contains people that Klout considers to be Socializers.



The first time you click this new button you'll need to tell Twitter that we can access your account details.



Clicking the 'Login via Twitter' link will redirect you to a page owned by Twitter where you can enter your username and password. Note: we don't ever know what your password is. All we need is the 7 digit number that Twitter gives you which you should enter in the textbox marked 'PIN'. If you keep the 'Follow @tweetpivot' checkbox ticked you'll be able to keep informed about improvements to our service, but you are free to uncheck this. Click OK to move onto the List Selector screen...



If you've already created the list you want to add your selection to, just click OK. Alternatively, click the 'New List' button to create one...



Click OK and TweetPivot will start working. You'll see a 'busy' graphic at the top of the TweetPivot window but you can still continue to manipulate the whole collection you loaded.



Finally, we'll show you a notification window telling you that all the selected users are now in the list. You then have the option to automatically jump to that list on Twitter.com.

We hope you have as much fun using this feature as we had building it!

List Suggestions for You - the next Twitter feature?

With the twitterverse expanding at an mind-boggling rate, the challenge of identifying relevant and interesting content is becoming ever-more difficult. To combat this challenge, Twitter recently announced its new Suggestions for You capability that helps you identify interesting people to follow. The natural extension of this functionality would be for Twitter to make List Suggestions for You.

At TweetPivot we hope Twitter is already working on this feature, as list suggestions would be a great compliment to the functionality in TweetPivot that allows you to interactively explore lists.   If anyone from Twitter is reading this, we'd love to hear your thoughts. In the meantime, however you discover new lists, you can use TweetPivot to help determine if the list is for you or not. 

Follow @TweetPivot on Twitter for more list-based innovation coming soon... 

Discover Lists with Tweet Pivot

We've just added a great new feature to Tweet Pivot - the ability to pivot someone's Lists. Firstly, if you don't know what twitter lists are you should read Mashable's guide.

All you have to do is enter a user's screen name and, if they've created any, their lists will be displayed under the usual links to their friends and followers. Hovering over the "Lists" button will expand it to show the actual lists.



What's exciting about this development is the added richness that's apparent from pivoting lists as opposed to someone's friends or followers. People in lists tend to be, at a minimum, interesting - otherwise they wouldn't be in it. We've also found that the quality of the Klout data we import seems to be much better across a collection of list members compared to collections of friends or followers.

This new feature opens up some amazingly rich veins of twitter data. A very quick web search found this article by Marshall Kirkpatrick on Read Write Web: 10 Twitter Lists You Should Follow. Here are links to the Tweet Pivot collections based on the lists in the article.

1. Patrick LaForge: Linkers
2. Josh Elman: Awesome Social
3. Robert Scoble: Founders
4. Rebecca Leaman: Nonprofit Geeks
5. Chris Grayson: Augmented Reality Peeps
6. Mike Taylor: XMPP List
7. Raven Zachary: iPhone List
8. Christina Braden: Disability List
9. Ben Turner: Anthropology List
10. The ReadWriteWeb: Team List

As always, please tell us what you think and, if you like Tweet Pivot, retweet us.