Yesterday evening, I logged into the recently-created @TexasInnovation twitter account I run and received a startling, but fun, discovery–this message:

“New! Lists. A great way to organize the people you follow and discover new and interesting accounts. (BETA)

Lists are timelines you build yourself, consisting of friends, family, co-workers, sports teams, you name it. You’re part of a small group receiving this feature, so don’t tweet about it yet.”

Notice they didn’t say not to blog about it. And, um, notice they didn’t tell you all not to tweet about it. Ahem. I mean, if you wanted.

I am actually excited about this new feature, but am not sure how it might change things. Wanting to try it out, though, I went with my first instinct, which was to create a “McCombs” Twitter subscription list, so that people could subscribe to all of the school’s official tweets with the click of a button.

Here’s how the beta version seems to work (series of screen shots follows – click on any image for a bigger view):

The Announcement I received upon logging in. Hello, TwitList!

Creating the new list...you can make the list public or private.

Searching for a user to add to the list...

Adding the user to my list (you can select which list to add them to from a drop down menu).

My new list shows up highlighted in the right-hand side...

You can see how things look from the subscriber-side by going to @TexasInnovation and poking around.

The tech side of things seems basic enough. Now what to use the lists for? Ideas? Let us know in the comments what you plan to do with yours.