Twitter's much-buzzed "Lists" feature has gone live pretty much everywhere over the last few days, and if the initial flurry of activity is any indicator, Twitter lists are here to stay. The feature itself is fantastic, and promises to change the way that we use Twitter - almost certainly for the better.

The basic concept of Twitter lists is very straight-forward - any Twitter user can create a list of other users and share that list with their followers (or, if they prefer, keep that list private). Other Twitter users can choose to follow that list, instead of following each person individually, and they'll immediately begin receiving updates from all of the people on that list. If they want, they can view the lists individual members and follow them manually. Twitter users can even add themselves to lists (yet another form of shameless Twitter self-promotion).

Sounds simple. So why is it going to change the way that we use Twitter forever? The answer is organization, and its evil nemesis, clutter. That's always been one of the big problems with Twitter - it's all too easy to get things cluttered. You choose to follow a group of people because something's interesting to you in the short term, but you never really remember to go back and unfollow them when they're no longer relevant to your interests. With Twitter lists, that situation is gone - you simply follow their list, and unfollow the list when you're finished. If you want to stick with any of them, you can just follow them individually.

That's just one example of how Twitter lists cut down on the Twitter clutter and improve the user experience. There's myriad others; indeed, we have yet to see the full power of Twitter's lists feature in action.

One thing we're already seeing is "power-listers" - people who create comprehensive topical lists, such as this list of airlines on Twitter - list-minded Twitter users troll the site (and, indeed, other users lists) and try to assemble the most complete lists of Twitter accounts, in the hope that their account will get some attention through the attention that their list gets, or just in the hope that their lists will prove useful to others. We can expect to see these "power listers" make a big splash in the coming days and weeks - so if you want to get in on the ground floor, get yours lists started early!

One potential effect of Twitter lists will be to diminish the impact of #followfriday - although if last week was any indicator, that effect is going to be slow, as many Twitter clients don't yet support the list feature (as of the 30th of October, just two Twitter clients supported the lists feature). As more and more clients begin to support the lists feature, we can expect to see more and more people transitioning from #followrfriday to a slightly less hectic list recommendation format - after all, many Twitter users have complained for months that it's too difficult to keep track of #followfriday recommendations during the week.

Any way you look at it, Twitter's list feature adds a robust layer of interaction to the microblogging platform that has been sorely needed for a long time. Now if we could just get retweets built into the API sometime in the next decade...