Now you can categorize your favorite places into convenient, sharable lists that you can use to document travel experiences, plan future trips, suggest restaurants to friends and much more.

For instance, you could make a list of all the best places for Indian food in your town or all the best bars that you visited on your spring break trip to Palm Springs. If you’re doing research for a trip to Los Angeles, you could compile a list of all the museums and celebrity hotspots you want to hit while you’re there.

Users who go to their profile page will now see a large box called “Lists.” In that box, Foursquare has provided the user with suggested lists to get them started. These pull from recent and popular check-in locations, for instance, Foursquare suggested that I take my various check-ins at bars and beer stores and turn them into a “popular nightlife” list. You can create that list automatically if you want to.

If you choose to create a list from scratch, here’s what it’ll look like:

You can title the list any which way you like, and from there you can add a description, photos, and create tips for each location added to the list. Foursquare Lists seem to be a good way to make use of the “Tips” and “To-Do” functions that have never gained as much popularity as the default check-ins have.

Once you’ve made a list, you can choose to make it open for editing. This way, friends can keep a collaborative list going between as many people as desired.

Just like everything we do at foursquare, Lists are all about sharing with your friends. Want to plan a trip to Paris? Create a blank list and share it with your friends who know the city best. They can load it up with all their best suggestions. Think your buddy will love your list of best food trucks in Los Angeles? It’s simple to share it with him. And, best of all: the lists are alive. If friends later add more places to a list you follow (like the Hipster Coffee Shop Explosion list), you’ll see everything they drop in.

Once you choose to “follow” a particular list, you can share it with other Foursquare friends or share it to Facebook and Twitter.

Collaborative lists look like another push toward a “more social” feel to Foursquare. Back in July they added a new notification system that alerts users whenever friends comments on check-ins, people perform one of your tips, the location you’re checked-in at starts swarming, and much more.

Update: On the Twitter Status Blog, the company announced that it has expanded the availability of the "Lists" feature to 5% of its users. The company also says it will work its way up to a full rollout in the coming weeks.

Original Article: Twitter is testing a new feature, called Lists, with a small subset of users. The feature is designed to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. In other words, you will be able to group together certain accounts you follow, making Twitter much more useful.

"For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense," says Nick Kallen, who is the project lead on the feature.

Twitter says lists are public by default, but they can be made private. The lists you’ve created are linked from your profile. That means you can find interesting lists that others have created. This should prove to be a good way to find new people of interest. You can subscribe to other people’s lists and others can subscribe to yours.

"We started working on this feature because of the frequent requests we received from people who were looking for a better way to organize information on Twitter," says Kallen.

Twitter will make the feature available not only on Twitter.com, but will include a lists API. The company says more information about this will come out in a few days. It should be noted that some third-party apps already have the capability of grouping Twitter accounts. The public user-subscription feature is an interesting twist though.

The feature should go a long way for reducing the "noise" that is commonly associated with Twitter use. When you can break tweets down into separate categories, Twitter is much easier to enjoy.

There has been no date given for when the feature will launch for all accounts. Twitter just says it will be available once they’ve finished testing.

1. Google’s Countdown of Tips

2. Jaw droppers of 2008 – what they’d rather you forgot

3. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008

4. 9 Reasons You Need Social Media Marketing in 2009

5. 12 Cool Twitter Add-Ons for the 2008 Holiday Season

6. Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008

7. Top 10 from the Inside AdWords Blog

8. Gadget Picks for ’08

9. The Ten Most Popular Viral Videos of 2008

10. The Year 2008 in Google Earth

Of course, I’ve been working on a few year-end lists of my own. You may have come across my look at the year in online video or online music. I looked at the most commented on articles and WebProNews, and the year in Search and Social Media (those coming soon).

Enjoy the lists, and get ready for a whole new year with plenty of great stuff to come.

Ask.com says they didn’t “sanitize” the list—as evidenced by including #3:

1. MySpace
2. Dictionary
3. Google
4. Themes
5. Area Codes
6. Cars
7. Weather
8. Games
9. Song Lyrics
10. Movies

And when they say they don’t sanitize it, they mean they didn’t take out porn terms, either. Odd . . . I could’ve sworn that the premise behind their big ad push this year was that Ask was a good way to find porn. . . .

Does it seem a little strange to anyone else how extremely generic these searches are? Other than MySpace and Google, what are these people looking for? “Themes”? The weather all over the entire world? Every movie ever made? Come on.

A few other interesting gems from their many lists: Ron Paul is the seventh most popular presidential candidate after Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Fred Thompson, John Edwards, Mitt Romney and John McCain—but don’t worry, Paulites. He’s still beating Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and Dennis Kucinich.

Also interesting? No mention of Britney Spears anywhere. For once.

Comment

Classified Intelligence cited the announcement, which was posted on the Craigslist forums:

Over the last 6 months we have received a lot of feedback in this forum and by email, the consensus of which is that a $25 fee for posting jobs in these four cities would be beneficial, with many recent comments to the effect that we may have waited too long to implement such a fee.

Though some have balked at the new fee, many Craigslist devotees welcomed the announcement. Classified Intelligence noted the impact of adding job posting fees in markets previously by the site:

Job ads are a cash-cow for Craigslist; the number of job listings in New York and Los Angeles dropped substantially when the fee began, “but the volume quickly rebounded and by 2007 had more than tripled in each city,” the company said.

“After an initial drop-off in ad volume (in Boston, San Diego, Seattle and Washington) similar to that experienced in NYC and LA, the volume of legitimate job ads in these four cities has more than doubled.”

In addition to the job fees, Craigslist charges $10 for brokered apartment listings in New York City. Classified Intelligence believes the site’s job listings perform better, as fees drive out the junk postings.

Google Updates Webmaster Malware Reviews

Google and StopBadware.org have been providing a service to users of the search engine by warning of links to potentially dangerous sites. Such warnings may be news to webmasters of those sites, as they may not realize they have been compromised.

Google improved upon its communication with those webmasters, as noted in an update to the Google Webmaster Central blog. The process for removing malware warnings from a cleaned-up site should be quicker now.

After reviewing Webmaster Tools for URLs Google considers dangerous, the webmaster can make changes and request a malware review from Google. If it clears the review, malware messages should be removed within 24 hours, generally.

If the review finds more problems, Google will update the list of dangerous URLs it has detected for webmasters to check. Causes of positive detections can vary; StopBadware lists common threats that will cause Google to warn people against continuing to a site from the search results.

The coworker won. Of 90 “Top 7″ stories submitted to Digg, 53 made the front page—59%.

Second place? Top 12: 34 stories submitted, 16 made popular—47%.

Top tens took third, with 39% of the 1680 “Top 10″ stories submitted to Digg becoming popular. Top 5s and Top 11s tied for fourth, with 29% of 558 stories and 34 stories becoming popular, respectively.

Interestingly, it could be the popularity of Top 10 and Top 5 lists that make them less popular (by the way, thanks, ProBlogger—the Group Writing Project triggered nearly 1000 Top 5 posts throughout the blogosphere).

There were more top 10 stories (1680) than any other numbered list stories submitted to Digg. Top 5s were a distant second, with less than a third as many (558). With so many stories on Digg, it’s going to be a lot harder for a significant number of them to become popular—not to mention the eye-rolling and sighing that have begun to accompany posts with “Top 10″ in the headline. Top 7 lists are the third most popular, with less than 1/6th as many top 7s as top 5s. Still, they outperformed their more popular compatriots.

One final note: if you’re making Diggbait, don’t use the Top 3, Top 4, Top 6 or Top 8 format. Less than 10% of stories in each of those formats actually become popular on Digg.

Somehow, I doubt that David Letterman will change his format.

Comments

The result: if you can’t think of ten different things to say, it’s not a problem.  “7 is the magic number, it seems the most comfortable – not exhausting but not incomplete,” writes Jones.  “Perhaps our attention span is shorter than ever?”

“Top 7” lists actually scored a 59% success rate, as measured by Jones, compared to 39% for the traditional Top 10 compilations.  Marketing Pilgrim’s Jordan McCollum, who noticed Jones’s experiment long before I did, also points out that “success” was defined as making the front page of Digg.

Top 12 lists were fairly high achievers, then, registering at a 47% success rate.  “Perhaps 12 feels ‘comprehensive’ and ‘complete,’” suggested Jones.  Top 12 lists were also the longest lists he measured, which leaves me wondering how a 13- or 14-item list would have performed.

How did some other, lower numbers fare?  Well, a Top 3 or Top 4 barely qualifies as a list – don’t bother unless you’re happy with less than a 10% rate of success.  Top 8 lists did even worse, for some reason.   Top 5 and Top 11 lists achieved an equal success rate of 29%.

These statistics could become very useful to Digg users – after all, with 2,500 different pieces in the running, it’s unlikely that one extra-interesting Top 7 list could have skewed Jones’s data set.  But there’s also the theory that measuring something changes it . . .  If a flood of Top 7 lists ensues, don’t expect to see their success continue for long.

Eye-opening at first, but rather than a blow-by-blow response, why not sum it up this way:

• Should you do extra work to label your content or install sitemaps? Hmm, only if you want to be found.
• We’re talking about publishers, not people. Therefore, purveyors of information (and/or products and offers) in a hugely competitive, open environment. Tom’s article, for example, sports ads for conferences as well as Edelman, the world’s largest PR firm. Seems like a tag or two might be a decent tradeoff for the exposure. You don’t expect the engine to actually write the content for you, so what’s a bit of extra metadata between friends? As for “people,” it’s the users that are getting a good deal out of the extra work you might do to label your content

More detailed response:

• Tags or labels are indispensable when it comes to some kinds of content, such as videos or photos
• If something is useful or popular enough, depending on the community, third-party tagging can be helpful. What’s the incentive to do this? Interesting question. What’s my incentive to type this sentence? But yes I think there is a huge bunch of unlabeled stuff that probably will stay unlabeled because there is no incentive to label it. That doesn’t mean search engines aren’t going to try to “organize it and make it universally accessible.”
• The article’s general tone seems to suggest that the search engines are stingy about “sending their robots around.” Far from it! Even relatively unpopular sites are spidered frequently nowadays.
• Search engines have advanced in many ways over the past few years. One of them is their sheer storage capacity. Index size is a huge challenge, which brings us to:
• The claim that corporate search engines are doing a better job of letting publishers take the lazy way out is a bit odd. It’s a much smaller dataset, so stuff is much easier to find. But I’ll grant that it is interesting that some of these technologies are quite good at recognizing industry-specific patterns, and autocategorizing content — no user tagging required. But that’s a whole internal debate in the info retrieval field. I’m sure some companies use human categorization!
• Search is a bit like matchmaking, and the meaning of what “search” is has expanded. Take the emerging field of local search. Now add the premise that “refine is the new search” (I don’t think it really is on its own, but users definitely want to be able to “drill down” to get exactly what they want by telling the search engine). And hey, why not toss in the idea of geolocation & mapping. So I’m a user and I’m looking for a hardware store, let’s say. Let’s say I also want to find a hardware store that sells a certain brand of doorbell. I’d prefer it be within 20 minutes driving distance. And I want to find one that is “open 24 hrs.” (just for argument’s sake). None of that is ever going to be findable without a huge amount of research, unless of course the “publisher” (hardware store owners) is willing to upload their information in a structured format. By uploading that info, buyer and seller connect more easily. By not uploading it, you choose “not to be on the map.” It’s your choice.
• Things like Google Base are arguably research projects to help Google find out what are some common categorization schemas in a given industry – or a whole category, like brick and mortar retail. (If “open 24 hrs.” is a common one, then maybe it’ll come up more often in search and navigation databases as a yes/no item down the road, let’s say.)

In short, the claim that “people should just find me” is a bit like building an all-graphics site and hoping people will find you when they search for “guitar pick.” Or sitting on your back porch strumming “Galveston” and praying you’ll be invited onto American Idol.

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Yahoo! & Yahoo! Tech:

• Yahoo! Tech has a holiday shopping guide and a holiday gift guide as well as user voting. Notice the anchor text on those first two links…they are naming some of their services specifically for keywords.
• Yahoo! Tech also offers fake celebrity wish lists where they tell you what they suspect certain celebrities would like. Which is quite absurd considering one of their celebrities is a Yahoo! worker. How hard would it be just to go get their real wish list directly?
• Yahoo! wraps content in a small bite size video format called The 9. Notice how The 9 packages content, links off to other sites where necessary, but often features other Yahoo! content. This news is packaged as though it is not an advertisement for Yahoo!’s various content properties.
• What is scary is that the editorial is fairly lenient, occasionally adding real value. Yahoo! is posting tips on how to save money on Amazon.com.

Amazon:

• Amazon Advantage allows publishers and authors to customize their product level pages.
• Amazon offers author blogs, and syndicates popular blogs
• Amazon has their own product and technology blog which recently pointed out how you can try Microsoft Office 2007 for free.

Some of the large platforms have significant market leverage, capital, the ability to quickly test and track the results of tests, improving user feedback integration, recommendation engines, and are adding features to make ordering easier in higher priced and more complex verticals. Add all those forms of value creation and optimization to a blend of ads and editorial content and it is going to be hard to compete with them in the search results.

If you are a niche player and do not have a compelling editorial element or industry standard reference documents it is going to be hard to compete in a few years.

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