My attention span is dwindling.

A few weeks ago - no - a week? I don’t know.

Recently, Twitter started letting you make lists. I sort of wondered, why?

Well I guess we all have different strategies for monitoring our social networks. I have a friend who only follows 50 people on Twitter. I’m not one of them, and the hell with him anyway. Personally, I use a handy desktop application to group together the people whose twits I don’t want to miss.

But other folks apparently were creating multiple Twitter accounts to group their friends. So, lists.

The thing I don’t like about making a list, and making it public is that it feels a lot like middle school: someone else is always telling you what group you belong to.

Which is really opposite from how other popular social networks work. You join groups. Clay Shirky says so. I am not so much of a group-joiner, but I do count myself as a subscriber of many things.

Anyway, I think there’s a big difference between deciding what groups you belong to and having someone else tell you.

So I started making Twitter lists. I mostly know about librarians, so I made lists of those. There are 50,000 librarians on Twitter, and I needed to narrow it down some, so I decided to focus on male librarians. My first impulse was to group together the cool kids, just like middle school.

I started grouping male librarians into a list of interweb guybrarians. But that was silly. Male librarians on Twitter didn’t seem distinctive enough. So I narrowed the list to male librarians on Twitter who make lists on Twitter, and added myself, since I was now making a list. Now I felt less guilty about throwing random strangers in with some people I have met and admire.

And I started looking at what kinds of lists they made:

The most common kind of lists that librarians make is of other librarians:

• Mark Dellenbaugh’s “library-folk“
• Bill Drew’s “librarians“
• Brad Czerniak’s “librarians“, “librarians2” and “librarians3“

This seems pretty utilitarian, but I can’t imagine trying to keep up with 100 or 1,000 people chattering away about mostly the same thing.

Other folks made multiple lists for different groups of followers. Andrew Finegan makes list of tweetups, real-people, writers, comedy, cabaret and librarians.

Exploring further, I was finally able to confirm my middle school thesis (ok, it was more of a topic sentence) in David Lee King’s list “cool-peeps“. My take is that David has a lot of followers, and follows a lot of people, and that he probably wanted to focus on the people he is really interested in hearing from, and that’s fine. But to make it public, and to use a value-based label? It makes me want to spend recess listening to my walkman with the girl with purple hair and clothespins all over her body.

Part of the problem here is the way people are encouraged to follow each other as part of a reciprocal exchange of social network capital. I don’t know if this is really what is going on, but if King didn’t feel the need to follow 1,700 people in the first place, there would be no need to narrow it down. And note, I’m not saying it’s his fault. It’s peer pressure!

Michael Stephens, another internet guybrarian has a similar number of followers as King (minus 1,000), but follows only 194. His list, “lis768” has only 13 people, and from the title, I’m going to guess they are students in one of his classes. I can’t think of a more perfect opportunity to make a public list. You’d like to communicate with a group and encourage the group to communicate with each other, and it is just small enough that it might actually work.

To be sure, there are other kinds of lists. John Kirriemuir’s” men-with-beards” is a prime example.

When I decided on the final criteria for interweb guybrarianship, I had to remove a bunch of non-listmaking male librarians. What to do with them. Inspired again by Jason Scott (aka Sockington, I decided to classify them as “library-hunks“.

As it turns out, at least according to my schema, male librarians are way more likely to be hunks than interweb guybrarians.

The fallout so far is that I’ve gained a few followers from the second list and I don’t think any from the first. I feel like a middle school tool, getting attention any way he can. I’m really sorry about that.

If I’ve put you on either of these lists, it doesn’t mean I think you are particularly attractive, or geeky, it just means that during the 20 or 30 minutes I spent making them lists, I happened to find you, probably from someone else’s list of librarians.

Some searches I have going on in the background of my Twitter client tell me that I made a few people’s day by putting them on the library-hunk list, and one person was excited to be an internet guybrarian, and seeing that feedback might have made it all worthwhile.

If you withheld feedback, I probably think you’re great. If we’ve met in person, I probably like you. if we haven’t met, we should get together. To hell with lists, I’ll keep them up for another week or month then zzzt.