Thursday, May 06, 2010

Twitter Lists & @sachin_rt

Now that Sachin Tendulkar, a popular right handed batsman from India, has joined Twitter, everyone and  their aunt is making a beeline to follow his 140 characters of wisdom and thus increasing India's Twitter population. There will perhaps never be a better time to plug my post from a few months back, Dummies Guide to Twitter.

One new addition to Twitter since then, somewhat underutilised so far, is Twitter Lists. However, I find it to be  one of the best feature of the micro blogging site as it allows to follow people, listed in bunches the way you want, and not have them clog your timelines.

This is how it works. Let us say you are interested in what a bunch of people are tweeting, but you don't your timeline to be cluttered with their tweets, perhaps because they tweet too much, or because they all belong to a particular profession and you would want to read their tweets together. What you can do is without actually following them, you can create a Twitter List, and add all of them to the list. This will appear on your Twitter homepage. You can click on the list and read all that these people have to say.

Here's an example - I took a bunch of people from the media -  e.g. Rajdeep SardesaiBarkha Dutt,  Vikram ChandraPrannoy Roy etc - and added them to a list that I created called Media-People Now if and when I want to read their tweets, I just go to the list and see what's going on. Similarly I have also created a list for

Cricketers

Bollywood &

Googlers

You can just follow these lists (just like you can follow an individual Twitterer) and you also just need to go to the list and see all that's being talked about, and your timeline remains clean. You can also see how  many lists you have been made a part of, this is shown next to your 'following' and 'followers' count under 'listed'


In the 2 days since he joined Twitter Sachin has already been added to more than 2500 lists. Mostly he's been added to lists called - Sports, Cricket, Heroes, Legends, God (very common) and Genius. However I came across these somewhat 'unusual' lists that Sachin has been listed in by his followers!

Colleagues

Weird that I don't remember the list owner having played for the India, Mumbai Indians or the Mumbai cricket teams.

Nonspammers

I agree, though Sachin has been tweeting a bit much, can't call him a spammer yet!

Salman Khan

A little bit of an identity crisis there, Sachin is sachin and Salman is Salman. Or so I thought.

Geeks

The advantage of being Sachin Tendulkar is that just by joining Twitter you are labelled a geek.

Aussie

He definitely holds a good record against the Aussies, but does that make him an Aussie himself?

Non-Tech

Interesting way of looking at life, either you are 'Tech' or 'Non Tech'. Cricketers fall under the latter, unless you're Anil Kumble.

Cool South Asians

Another new way of looking at the man we've always associated with cricket and India. And God.

Un Met

An honest list owner, he hasn't met SRT and he is not ashamed to say so.

SRK

If Sachin can be Salman then why not SRK? Fair point, fair listing.

Reliable Sources Cool People

When you've scored all those runs and centuries you're indeed somewhat cool. And winning the matches for India makes you quite reliable too. Another honest label.

Leaving Legend

This may come in for some criticism. Agreed he's growing old, but does just that force him to leave the league of legends? The jury will be out on this.

P.S: Sachin has confirmed that @sachin_rt is indeed him. Also, the his account now carries the 'verified' icon. Thanks @manansinghi for the tip.

7 comments:

Harsha said...

"Sachin Tendulkar, a popular right handed batsman from India" - got to be the most understated introduction for Sachin...

Saurish-Chit said...

Well Suhel,your first is line is like some Greek writing about cricket!!
The first line atleast as far as I am concerned,sours the tase of an otherwise good article...

champ said...

Suhel, I think leaving legend actually meant living legend :P, anyways SRT is under the l33t list in my case...I guess this is the power of SRT, anything his does is destined to be legendary even if he wants to keep it simple :)

Abhishek said...

Nice post, but really what struck me is the first line. "Sachin Tendulkar, a popular right handed batsman from India..." is a wonderfully understated, possibly tongue in cheek comment. There is also a possibility that you wrote it to bring out some sort of righteous indignation from this popular batsman's fans and followers. Fair play to you.
I had promised a riposte to you and here it is:
I have found Google, a popular internet search engine, to be useful at times. ;)

Alekhyah said...

Sure Sachin is a common God, but a list named God IS funny. And what made you dig up all His followers and then come up with this list of lists -what were you challenging?:)

Tanmay Mukherjee said...

Why is the introduction to SRT such a big deal is beyond me. What if a Mexican is reading this blog? Or Biz Stone? Then this intro makes perfect sense and is absolutely 'international'.

Lovely post, especially for a twitter novice like me,now I know how to discreetly follow Prabhu Chawla's insightful tweets without having to display them on my twitter home page.

It is simply amazing how you get castigated in India for calling Sachin 'a popular right handed batsmen from India'. I guess at some level any kind of idol worship tickles the Raj Thackrey in you!

Michelle said...

I do salute Sachin and his mastery. But above all I bow down to how he handles the pressure. But sachin has a small message to convey to every Indian since they hear him out. He has to ask them to concentrate in every sport and carve out an Indian niche sportsman in every single field.