Nothing makes me happier than coming across a practical toolset to help the unemployed streamline their job search efforts. Enter: ListiMonkey…a site doing just that.

We all know a few months ago Twitter launched Twitter Lists. Since then there has been a craze of articles and blog posts trying to explain the best way to use these lists. People are using them for branding, ORM, categorization and all sorts of other good stuff. It's obvious Twitter lists have potential for job seekers as a way of keeping tabs on potential companies or employers. You can group companies you have applied to versus ones you are hoping hire soon versus ones you are in talks with, and so on and so forth.

Unfortunately, just like with many other social site functionalities, these lists can be hard to scale. You can spend so much time setting up the lists, then scanning them for pertinent information, reaching out to people, waiting for responses, and scanning again. There is a lot to it, and as any job seeker can confirm…the job search is already incredibly time consuming.

Fortunately for all of us some people got together and created ListiMonkey (aka Listiti), best understood as “Google Alerts for Twitter lists.” Listiti alerts you whenever someone belonging to a Twitter List of your choice tweets about something you want to track.

For example, let’s say there are three or four companies you want to track in case they post openings in marketing. You can create a list with these companies on it and then set Listiti to track that list for words like “job opening,” “marketing,” etc.  In a similar vein if you want to track a bunch of HR leads on one list and data mine their tweets for particular job openings, you can do that as well. Pretty sweet huh?

Note: Right now the only option is to get hourly alerts, but I am thinking this will change soon enough as they roll out new versions.

Listiti also offers badges to help you promote a twitter list or account, which isn’t as relevant for our purposes here, but is a cool added functionality. It’s worth checking out for sure.

And as is most of this social-application-awesomeness we are learning and loving…Listiti is a free-service right now, although the creator (@xdamman) does accept beers from anyone visiting the San Francisco area.

Awesome job Xavier...definitely excited to watch this service grow.