Those new lists that Twitter has are nice, but it’s a pain to find them. At the beginning of November I mentioned some search tricks to help you look but I was also hoping to find some place that had lists. And I did hear about such a place recently — TweetDeck!

TweetDeck’s list directory, at http://tweetdeck.com/beta/, has what appears to be thousands and thousands of lists available grouped across nine categories including Regional, Politics, and Business. You can also search by keyword if you don’t want to browse.

I took a look at the Tech & Science Directory. This category had about twenty subcategories, with the number of lists in the subcategory ranging from 20 (aerospace) to 150 (several lists, as that seems to be the TweetDeck directory’s upper limit.) Lists are presented in groups of fifteen. Information for each list includes the number of accounts that the list follows, the number of accounts that follow the list, and the average number of tweets per day. There’s also a few tags/words associated with the listing.

If you click on the list name you get more information including a list of some of the members, description (sometimes) and a word cloud. Clicking on a word in the cloud, however, searches the directory — it does NOT take you to the list. To get you to the list you’ll need to go to the user name on Twitter and pick up the list there. (There is an “Add Twitter List” button, but every time I tried it I got a 500 error, possibly because I’m only using the directory and not using TweetDeck.

I’m not really sure how this taxonomy works, and I found sometimes that the search worked better than the directory but there’s a loooooooot of reading material here. Worth a look.