I’m a big fan of the newish Twitter List function. I wrote about it last week – 5 Reasons to Use the New Twitter Lists Feature

Now that I’ve you pumped up about using lists, I want to talk about a few tools that I think can make the feature even more useful.

Twitter List Widget – (example above) this is a homegrown Twitter feature that’s pretty well hidden. Scroll to the bottom of your Twitter homepage and look for the link called Goodies. Then click Widgets, MyWebiste, ListWidget. Widgets allow you to easily publish content, such as your Twitter Stream, to your web site or blog. Wisely, Twitter also added one for the List. Now, with relative ease you can publish updates of a list in your blog sidebar.

Listorious – This service lists all the lists. Using Listorious you can find the 140 most popular lists, find people who show up on a lot of lists, or just search for lists you might find interesting to follow. You can follow a list without following all the people on the list, but this may be a really great way to find individuals you would like to follow. (My Small Biz Stars list is in the top 100 – go follow please and see if we can go for the top 25)

Listiti – (not sure about how to say this in mixed company, but) – this service bills itself as Google Alerts meets Twitter. The idea here is that you can tell the service what list you are tracking, but this further tell it you only want to know when someone on the list mentions your specific search term. When they do, you get an email alert. This is pretty nice way to follow lists with lots of people on them but filter the stream down to stuff you’re really interesting in.