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Find Twitter Lists by Exploring Tags

I’ve covered ways to find Twitter Lists before — via directories and a couple of search tricks — but I am not content. I have yet to find a way to search for Twitter lists that makes me say, “Okay, I’ve found everything I’m looking for, I don’t think I’ll miss much.” I’m still not content but I like List Tags, which allows you to enter a Twitter user, find out what tags are associated with them, and then get lists based on those tags. It’s available at http://www.mustexist.com/list_tags.

Start by entering the Twitter name of someone whose tweets you like and would like to see more of. I entered Jack Schofield of the Guardian; he tweets at jackschofield. Note that I found it was better to enter someone who tends to tweet on a specific topic or group of topics. When you enter someone who tweets more generally, you get more unfocused tags.

I entered jackschofield and after a few minutes of waiting I got a tag cloud that looks like this:

You see there are three columns here: there’s a tag cloud (or rather tag column) generated by the lists that follow Jack. If you click on tag you’ll get the second column: lists that match that tag for Jack (in this case Tech.) Finally, the third column shows the “top” lists for that particular tag (I put top in quotes because I don’t know the methodology.)

I found this useful as a Twitter list dicovery tool when I found a tag that might be applied to one list in Jack’s case, but spawned a list of other lists I hadn’t heard of before — for example, the tags journos, digerati, and socialmedia. Note you do have to use common sense when finding tags for followup — the more general the tag the less useful the list generated (“recommended,” for example, or “best”.)

Great tool. The only thing I didn’t like about it is you can’t mouseover the list names for more information (like the number of people it’s following.) You’ll have to leave the site and go to the Twitter list page for more information. At least that opens in a new tab.

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