[Ireland] Social media consultants Simplyzesty started using Twitter Lists to list blogs. However, a brainwave has lead them to take Twitter Lists to their logical conclusion: creating lists of Twitter users in entire countries. They’ve launched a Twitter list for the UK and the list of users in Ireland is currently going crazy. They call it “crowdsourcing populations”. Who knows – this could end up being a sort of crowd-sourced yellow pages/people directory.

A couple of hours ago they launched a USA version with a script built to make the listings automatic. The plan is to do is to cover the USA in 72 hours.

Here’s how you get yourself into the list. The Irish one was built by hand, but the others are going to be built with a script but Twitter users tweeting “I want to get listed #TwitterCalifonia [or another state]” and Simplyzesty will collect all the tweets and add them to the lists for each State. In the UK Twitter users can tweet #TwitterEssex, replacing the county name with the county you live in.

Now clearly this might raise some issues for some (do you really want to be publicly listed as being in a certain country?) and potentially creates a list others might decide to abuse. We all know what happened to email eventually. It’s also clearly a useful marketing exercise for Simplyzesty.

But the lists could also show roughly where the Twitter populations are most active in the US (California is my fairly sure bet).

The full US Twitter lists are here, here and here because there are 50 states but Twitter only allows you 20 lists per profile.

by Mike Butcher on November 4, 2009