When I logged onto Twitter a couple of minutes ago, I was greeted by a banner saying:

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! (Author’s note: Sorry, but I couldn’t help myself.)

I feel so web2.0 that I think I’m going to have to hop on over to Google Wave and notify all my Facebook buddies about how great it is to be tweeting about Apple!

In a nutshell, lists are actually more like categories. What you do is you create a list and then add the people who’s tweets you want to appear in the list. So for example you could create one called “family” and then have all your family members’ tweets in there. If you mark it as public, anyone can subscribe to that list so that they too can see all those tweets.

So if you’re, for example, running a podcasting network, all the show hosts could add themselves to one list to make it easier for their listeners to follow them.

That said, the feature is still in beta - and it shows. As far as I can tell, there’s currently no way to delete lists. However, I think that once the feature is out of beta and online groups start to promote their lists, it could be pretty useful.