Twitter has now added the ability to build lists of users to every account … and the high school popularity contest is on.

The latest new feature on Twitter could be highly useful on the surface of it.  You can now group users into various groups so it makes it easier for you to follow people in your Twitter feed who are separated into your family, co-workers or any common theme you can think.  When people visit your profile they can also see your lists to see if they want to follow that list of people, or just find or two people who interest them.

This is something the third-party Twitter client TweetDeck has been able to do for some time now, but now you can just do it through the basic web interface of the site.  While this sounds like a great idea for the site, and a way for people to be able to find more interesting individuals to follow, it has already turned into a giant popularity contest where all people are concerned about is how many lists they appear on.

Twitter made one fatal mistake in the implementation of the feature in that how many lists a user appears on is displayed on their profile page.  What may have seemed like a simple enough idea has instantly turned into a giant popularity contest which has fatally broken the functionality of the lists.

Users are already clamoring to get on as many lists as possible to climb an imaginary chart of what users are somehow the most worthy of following, like this number some how lends credibility to them being someone would recommend everyone should follow.

Don’t believe that people would actively lobby to get on lists?  Check out this post from Pete Cashmore on Mashable where he blatantly begs for the company account to be added to as many lists as possible.  (In the interest of full disclosure, I worked for Mr. Cashmore/Mashable from July 2007 to April 2009)

What could have been a nice little tool, and still will be for a goodly number of users, has already been bastardized in to some sort of ultra-metric to determine just how popular and important a user is on the service.  It won’t just be people like Mr. Cashmore who end up turning the tool into some sort of Homecoming Queen popularity contest, the spammers will soon invade the system, creating accounts that have no other purpose than to put their main accounts on the fake account’s lists.

All of this being said, there are numerous people on Twitter that will simply create lists of their friends and co-workers and will never cross into this new dark underbelly of social media, but for those of us that work in and around social media … thanks Twitter for the new annoyance.  How long until PR companies start judging which writers to speak with based on how many lists they are on?  How long until mainstream media judges whom to interview based on a poor perception of how “listed” somehow equals authority, influence or reach in the social media space?