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Shortly after a shooter took the lives of 13 American soldiers at Fort Hood last week, some news organizations used Twitter Lists to help report information as it surfaced. It caught the attention of both journalists and social media observers.

Let’s see if those lists still provide useful updates or at least some basic information about the news that broke seven days ago.

Here are five recent tweets from the list created by CNN.

Fort Hood list from @cnnbrk

And here is a the top of the list from Dallas Morning News.

Fort Hood Shootings list from @DallasCrimeThese are the results from The Today Show’s list.

Fort Hood list from @todayshow

The Huffington Post has a good page of Twitter coverage. From that page, this is their list of Fort Hood Locals.

Fort Hood Locals list from @huffingtonpost

I think the New York Times did the best job with this one. They simply deleted their now useless list altogether.

Fort Hood Shootings list from @nytimes

I am not saying that all Twitter lists become useless for news organizations, of course. There are many ways journalists can make use of Twitter lists.

But if lists eventually lose their usefulness for breaking news, are there other real-time solutions that can do a better job? Visit the Fort Hood pages from Topsy, BlogRunner, Moopz, Kosmix, Tinker, OneRiot, DayMix, TipTop and AllVoices and let me know what you think. Do those pages work better than Twitter lists, or do they too become irrelevant seven days after news breaks?

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