The Official Klout Blog

With the recent addition of Twitter Lists, we’ve been cooking up some new tools in the Klout labs to help users take advantage of this new functionality.  As you’ve probably already seen for yourself, Twitter Lists let you group and organize people on Twitter, creating categories by topic to help you track different content streams.

Even though the Twitter Lists have only been public for a few weeks, we’ve already seen some interesting use cases for them – namely, by news organizations – and they really demonstrated their capacity of becoming a valuable format for tracking developing news stories during the Ft. Hood shootings.

The Columbia Journalism Review wrote:

“The lists—which offer a running stream of information, updates, and commentary from the aggregated feeds—represent a vast improvement over the previous means of following breaking news in real time. In place of free-for-all Twitter hashtags—which, valuable as they are in creating an unfiltered channel for communication, are often cluttered with ephemera, re-tweets, and other noise—they give us editorial order. And in place of dubious sources—users who may or may not be who they say they are, and who may or may not be worthy of our trust—the lists instead return to one of the foundational aspects of traditional newsgathering: reliable sources.”

At Klout, we decided to explore ways of making Twitter Lists easier to create and customize. Since we’re tracking and measuring influence on all sorts of topics across the social web, we can help you identify the people who are most influential on the topics that you care about.

Here’s a list of 50 influencers on Google:

Once you create a list, you can easily save it to your Twitter and track what the most trusted sources of information are saying about this topic at any given time. You can also choose to customize your list by selecting which users you ultimately want to follow or adding the people who you think are influential: