I must admit, I was a slow adopter of Twitter’s List feature when it was first rolled out. But now I can’t imagine how I got by without it.

Every person I follow or am followed by now is on a list. I have about a dozen lists, to separate local people, national news sources, journalists, politicians, friends and others. And increasingly I have started thinking of my Twitter lists as a digital Rolodex, allowing me to tune in to the people I need to talk to for certain topics.

It would be interesting to see how many Twitter lists actually exist, including the private ones. Only one of my lists is public, and I assume that a lot of other Twitter users keep their lists private.

And increasingly I think another use for Twitter lists will be to aggregate opinions during major news stories. As more politicians, celebrities, political activists and business leaders adopt Twitter, news organizations will be able to create Twitter lists about specific news stories. These can be used to can a quick glance at how the different sides feel about a story, but can also be embedded into a article but give readers a real time look at the discussion about a certain topic.