tlists allows you to search, curate, join and follow Twitter lists, a tool that is needed to make lists useful.  The main page starts you with a slick interface with some top lists and the hashtag categories they cover, as well as a search.  You are able to see the curator, apply to the list and even follow it.  Authentication is done via oAuth to Twitter for ease of integration your account.  You are able to add your own lists as well.

I authenticated myself quickly, with one of the best oAuth descriptive screens I have seen in the thousands of tools we review.  I was given views for:

• lists I own/curate
• share curation
• have applied
• follow

The charting of the lists showed stats on:

• hashtags
• members
• followers
• applications
• tweets per day
• balance
• status of who can apply to the list

Right there I was impressed with the list management so I moved on to searching.  I searched for Lotus, as in the software and learned something unique the service offers.  It showed me matching lists and SuperLists.

SuperLists are real-time channels comprised of the most frequently ‘listed’ Twitter feeds in a vertical or geographic category.

The TLISTS aggregator adds or updates tens of thousands of Twitter Lists every day. These Lists are continuously indexed by their name, description, member bios and recent member tweets — and then, if relevant, sorted into hundreds of popular categories. Several times a day, the Lists within every category are synthesized to generate the SuperList.

The matching SuperList is the channel that most frequently includes your search query.

This was a great discovery!!  If you decide to apply to a list it actually sends a tweet to the list owner asking to be added.  A tad self presumptuous having to ask someone to be part of it.  Mainly when the only follower of the list is the list curator themselves.

Still a great way to find lists, follow lists and help be part of simplifying seeing massive amounts of content without following hundreds of people.

Just like your Twitter contacts, you now have lists to manage them. Does Twitter really expect you to sort through hundreds and thousands of followers to group them together? Unfortunately, that seems to be the case. Listomatic! by SyndeoLabs is looking to solve your problem.

Listomatic is a dedicated Twitter list manager for your contacts. Simply drag-and-drop contacts into any of your Twitter lists. Listomatic’s search feature makes it easy to find who you’re looking for as quickly as possible. It’s well worth trying out if you plan on going on Twitter list creation spree.

ListAtlas makes Twitter lists simple by ranking them based on the number of followers.  The current leader being the list for the Twitter team themselves.  The top 5 is rounded out with two lists from Mashable and two lists from Scoble.  Each with a minimum of 2600 followers.

You can also use a handy search on the right side to find lists based on any keywords you wish.  My search for some entries didn’t find the result I know was there, so I am not sure how the search is being built just yet.  If the ability to follow the list could be added right from the search result, using oAuth, that would be excellent.

It wouldn’t take much to get into the top 250 lists on the site, with the lowest having 138 followers.  I am not sure how they are building and scanning every list in Twitter, but the author states he runs a script once a day to bring them all together.

Overall a great quick tool if you have to be like everyone else and find the popular lists.

Nothing further is required on your part except to approve access for  ConversationList to your Twitter account.  So if you’re interested in making the connections you want to make on Twitter or keeping up with developing ones, ConversationList is a good start.

ListBrowser is another project from Dave Winer and shows functional simplicity as expected.  The main screen is the logo above and a simple box asking for the username of the list owner.  You are then presented with, well thinking of it,  a list of lists for that person.  Clicking on any list brings up a simple view of members, the number of followed and followers for each person as well as their bio and links to them and the list itself.

The XML for the list is available and clicking on any user in the list then gives you their lists.  The idea became clear.  I like this person and they have a good list.  Up pops who belongs to that list and clicking on any member shows you their lists.  You can basically use this to jump around for hours finding good content and lists themselves.  If he adds in tag searching of some kind for the lists, it would be even better!