While I think there is real value in Twitter lists, I believe that it may be even more important to have a place where people can just type into a Twitter search engine “NYC seafood restaurant” and have it pull up all the Twitter accounts that meet these criteria. Obviously WeFollow and others are trying to do this, but I have yet to see a good solution.

This is why I think it would be a great business if someone just crawled all of the Twitter lists and took the user generated titles to create an uber Twitter index for all accounts. So for example, take bluewatergrill (a restaurant here in NYC):

http://twitter.com/bluewatergrill/lists/memberships

As you see by clicking on the above link, it’s on 22 lists. If you look at the titles of those lists, here are the words that show up most often:

Restaurant=8 times

Food=7 times

NYC=7 times

Seafood=2 times

From this information, it is pretty clear that Blue Water Grill is a seafood restaurant in NYC. As such, why doesn’t someone create the technology to crawl Twitter accounts and use the most popular words in the title of the lists that account is on as tags. By doing so, one could create a fantastic index that would allow people to type in any of these words (or a combination) and much more easily find accounts of interest.

In my opinion, these user generated titles are the real value of Twitter lists. Here’s hoping that someone like Listorious can leverage the content to create the uber Twitter directory.