Listerine Makes Twitter Lists Manageable

Listerine is a web application that will help you organize and manage your shiny new Twitter lists. As I’ve said before in regards to Twitter clients that have implemented groups: You have to have an easy method to manage lists/groups to actually make them useful. It’s great that Twitter has added lists, but they don’t allow you to manage these lists effectively. The only way to add people to a list is to visit their profile. If you follow hundreds or thousands of people, the time spent putting them into lists in this manner probably negates any benefit you would get from them.

Listerine helps to solve this issue. Once you load it up and connect it to your account, it will start to pulling in your Twitter contacts. All the lists you’ve already created show up along the top and your contacts occupy the center area. The search is tucked between the two. You can easily start grouping people by dragging them to a list. You can also use the auto selection mode by clicking Toggle on a list, then double-clicking the contacts you want to add. The later is my method of choice.

Besides letting your organize and build your lists from a simple interface, Listerine has a few more tricks up it’s sleeve. You can send a Direct Message to an entire list from the list’s Manage screen. There are three viewing modes: Small, Medium, and Large. The built-in search helps you locate specific people and put them in the right spot. For instance, I searched “Atlanta” and was able to put a few more people on my ATLiens list.

There are a few bugs that need to be worked out, but Listerine works pretty well. I ran into a few glitches using drag-n-drop and some operations take a second to happen, but that could be because it’s still trying to load up a couple thousand of my friends. It’s a good thing you can start using Listerine before it’s done loading all your contacts. If putting all your Twitter peeps on lists seems like too much work, Listerine might be the solution you need.