People to Follow on Twitter

You are what you read.

I’m always very intrigued by what the people who inspire me read. So I scour the internet to find hints of what books guys like Marco Arment, Jason Fried or Notch might be reading.

I’d also be very interested in seeing a Twitter news stream like they see it. Who’s inspiring them today? What bits of information are they glancing at that I might have missed in my own stream?

Twitter used to make this easy to do. There was a feature to read someone else’s Twitter stream. No more apparently.

However. Twitter publishes not just the people that follow someone, but everybody they follow. Their “followees”.

And there are lists. Twitter lists allow you to read a different news stream that’s just made up of tweets from people in that list. So I can go through the followees of someone and add each of them to a list.

The problem is that it’s a shit-ton of clicking to add each and every person Notch is following into my own list.

So…

I created a simple utility to do it. You can access it here.

All it does is ask you for a Twitter username of someone who inspires you. Then it goes to Twitter and asks you for the right permissions (it needs ‘write’ permissions to create a private list for you), and then it simply creates a private list and adds 100 of that person’s followees to the list.

That’s it. You can get the source code if you want here. It’s just a super simple Rails app of which the core functionality took about 20 minutes to write. If you have any ideas on making this more useful please feel free to let me know on Twitter for Github.

P.S. I’d be incredibly thrilled to meet you on Twitter: here