After first announcing its experiment with adding lists as alternate, swipeable tweet feeds back in June, Twitter is now rolling the option out to all users on iOS.
On our list? Make lists even better for you! ✅
— Twitter (@Twitter) September 23, 2019
Now on iOS, you can pin up to five lists, rearrange them, and swipe to access from home. pic.twitter.com/gNdfNE1DCl
As you can see in this example, users will now be able to pin up to five selected lists from their 'Lists' settings and have them appear as swipeable feeds from the home timeline. This will give users more ways to access specific discussions on the platform, which may make it a more engaging, interactive experience.
For example, you might like staying up to date with the latest tweets on your favorite TV show while it's airing, but also use Twitter for professional purposes during the day, keeping up with industry news and the like. It can be annoying to have your main feed interrupted with recap updates from that show - but now, you'll be able to separate those discussions completely, enabling you to engage with the program discussion when you choose, and keep it hidden when you're not interested.
The same goes with sports - I'm personally a big basketball fan, but I use my main Twitter feed for the latest industry news and updates. Now I can follow more basketball accounts via my lists, and switch over to check out the stream whenever I have the time free.
Twitter lists have long been considered an underrated feature - something Twitter itself has even acknowledged in the past - with many 'power' users exclusively utilizing lists to curate their on-platform experience. Given this, it makes a lot of sense for Twitter to provide more options on this front, while the capacity to be able to separate tweet discussions by topic will also make it easier to maintain context within each discussion, and may improve engagement as a result.
There may be some theoretical downside in the fact that you don't have to follow an account to add it to a list - so I could make a huge list of basketball-themed accounts and not follow a single one, but still monitor their tweet content, which may have some impact on their outward-facing metrics. But that's always been the case. This will make Lists easier to use, but the functionality in building them remains the same.
Overall, this seems like a good update for Twitter, and it'll be interesting to see how if and how users take up the swipeable streams option.
iOS users can check out the new streams process in the latest version of the Twitter app.