Filtering Twitter's Noise with Mixero
As many of us know, the usefulness of Twitter lies in the user's ability to find, refine, and engage with a network. Most of the invalid complaints about the service revolve around signal-to-noise ratios; of course you, Naysayer #583, don't want to know what I ate for breakfast. Neither does anyone else. This is called "noise," and it's what smart Twitter users are trying desperately to avoid.
Everyone raves about Tweetdeck's allowing users to create groups, which nicely sorts much of the information available in a collection of streams from followers. However, there are features beyond groups that could be useful for social noise reduction. Mixero has added filtering and channel creation to the current mix of available Twitter tools with interesting results.
Although Mixero is at present for Twitter only, the creators plan to add capabilities for parsing information from other social networks in the near future. They're also working on an iPhone client with an inline browser, landscape mode for message creation, and something called "avatar mode" that sounds very visual, indeed.
Basic Functions and UI
Overall, the UI isn't perfect, but it's a good start. Replies, DMs, and retweets are all very simple from this interface. You can hide @replies to other users, or choose to only see as-yet unread tweets. DMs between the primary user and a friend appear as nice, coherent, chronological chats. Previews are available for Flickr, Twitpic, and YouTube multimedia content; Mixero offers inline autocompletion for URLs and user names; and URLs can also be automagically shortened from the text entry field.
Groups
The familiar and much-lauded groups function allows users to classify followed users together. Groups are synchronized across devices and browsers, and followed users can be placed in more than one group. For example, I travel a lot, so I like to organize my peeps by location. However, I have a few bicoastal friends; with Mixero, they're easily put in both the LA Peeps group and the NYC Peeps group. Lovely.All a group's tweets are seen as a collective stream. New updates from members are in numbered, amber bubbles, and any DMs from members of that group appear as red numbered bubbles by the group's icon in the Active List.
Active Lists
Mixero also gives you a convenient Active Lists (between the tweet stream and the contact list) of icons for groups or individuals whose streams you check frequently; the lists are editable, of course, and make for lightning-fast reference if you want to quickly return to a group or user's stream or see your most frequently viewed groups/users as a collective stream. Active Lists can also serve as a kind of macrogroup of groups and individual users; for example, I could create a "Tech" list from my LA Peeps group, my SF/PA Peeps group, and a handful of lovely folks from other towns.Filtering
One of the most exciting Mixero features is filtering. For now, you can filter a single followed user's tweets, all followed users' tweets, your active list's tweets, or a group's tweets by a keyword or keywords. Any tweets containing the word(s) will appear in the results. It works a bit like search.twitter.com, narrowed down to the streams you actually care about.
As a side note, it would be nice to see related words show up, as well. I see one friend tweeting "live band," "piano," "drums." But if I searched his stream for "music," no results are returned.
Channels
The creation of channels is a curious feature that seems to require a bit of time and patience to perfect. The basic idea is that a user can use keywords to fine tune the stream from the mass of all Twitter users. He can also choose to hand-pick other users and keywords; for example, I could create a channel aggregating every tweet from @Brett, @OzSultan, and @Dingman containing the words "shenanigans" and "twitpic." What a channel that would be.
Note to the creators: It would be especially magical if I could get SMS or email updates with customized settings for each channel/group. My LA Peeps group updates can wait for the web, but the Shenanigans Pics channel? That needs to go straight to my mobile, STAT.
So, a channel can act as a finely tuned updater, a buzz-o-meter, a keyword monitor, a news aggregator - the limits here are your imagination and Mixero's search capabilities.
Verdict
Mixero's pretty awesome. It works well, has great features we've wanted to see for some time, and isn't unpleasant to look at, to boot. Interested parties should take a look at the demo video on their site and contact the creators to beg for a private beta invite. Or, you could follow Mixero on Twitter and wait for the public release.UPDATE: We've been given a limited but large number of beta invite codes. Email jolie@readwriteweb.com if you'd like one!
UPDATE ON THE LAST UPDATE: We're fresh out! We had 50 invitation codes, and they went like hotcakes. However, we do encourage you to contact the creators in case they have room left for beta testers, and definitely stay tuned for the public release!
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i think people will end up with multiple Twitter apps for various purposes.
eg I use Twhirl as my client (though Mixero looks great as well) but i also use www.MyTwitterButler.com for keyword search auto follow function.
At the end of the day you dont use the same email client for your mobile as you do for your desktop and it will be the same for Twitter.
Cheers,
dean
I had been looking for a client on my Mac and iPhone that can address my Twitter client requirements for some time.
I had used TweekDeck, then Seesmic Desktop, then Twittie for Mac, but I still cannot find one client that I am totally happy with at home, at work and on my iPhone.
Can't wait to check this out.
ooh mixero looks cool... I emailed them, not so much begging but I'd like to try the app. Thx for the good review :)
I have to take issue with one thing you've stated: how does Twitter's low signal-to-noise ratio qualify as an "invalid complaint"? Toolmakers who understand usability (hopefully including Mixero) should IMO address this as the single biggest problem of Twitter and similar services. Few users will ever be "smart users". They want -- and have a reasonable right to expect -- the client to do that for them. Failing this, I expect many users will abandon Twitter over noise fatigue. I haven't seen a single Twitter app that addresses low signal-to-noise in a truly usable way. ( Thanks for letting me rant ;c) ).
I appreciate the review of news tools, but I had to read all the way to the end to find out is wasn't (yet) available to us mere mortals.
Jolie, can you let us know in advance when something you review isn't available yet?
René
It is very confusing for readers of your email newsletter to not know who the "I" is with each article. It is only natural to envision the writer "speaking" the words, since you provide photos of most of your writers. But when one article is written by Marshall and another by Jolie, who do I envision? Beauty or Beast? :-) Please with all your technical expertise start including authors' names in your email newsletter.
Thanks for the best email newsletter online, period.
Buck Lawrimore
Anyone know if this is going to be for Macs only, or will there be a Windows version? Thanks!
I also wasn't sure what are the product requirements. Neither the article or Mixero site mention this although I may not have had enough caffeine yet.
Clients like this and Zensify are starting to address the problems of burgeoning lifestream data. There's great opportunity here if this is done right (what RSS readers have not achieved) My wonder is - will the UI be elegant enough to entice mainstream users, or just the technorati?
Looks great. Thanks for the heads up. One question: would trade in tweetdeck for it?
I got my beta invite. Yes, very cool. Lots of potential. I see it becoming a sort of multi window dashboard. It would be great if I could drag and drop in to groups and add to groups from the time line, but this is something that could really take us to the next level of Twitter clients.
Jolie, Thank you for such great review! And thanks to all readers for nice comments.
Marc: Usability is our main goal.
marcopolis: We are supporting Windows, Mac OS and IPhone. All versions are synchronized (groups, channels, context created on one device will be available on other)
Tris: Thank you. And sure, in Mixero you can add people right from a timeline ;) If you got invite code, just drag and drop a person avatar from a timeline in to your groups panel.
Got me an invite and am now playing. It's built on Adobe Air, so no problem for me in Windows.
@Benjamin, haven't yet played with it fully, but from the demo/video, it seems like it will really help me move away from "garbage overload" and just be information overloaded(!) - with the kind of grouping/filtering that gives me some more control (thanks for the Zensify tip, hadn't heard of that).
While I'm a bit more tech savvy than some colleagues in my non-profit sector, I'm definitely not the technorati and it's partially the UI that enticed me, along with all the possibilities for control/filtering/grouping, etc.
Off to play, will try to report back how easy it is to use for a techno-middle-grounder!
@Rene et al.: We've received a bunch of beta invite codes. Email me (jolie@readwriteweb.com) if you'd like to give Mixero a spin.
@Buck I'd hate to think how you struggle with a regular newspaper. The Washington Post must give you fits. ;)
I've been playing with the beta this afternoon, and so far I've been impressed. I really appreciate that it synchronizes over multiple devices.
One thing I haven't been able to figure out is the Active List. I assumed that would display a stream of all the groups and channels that I have in the center panel, but when I click on the "All Active List updates" icon, the left panel is blank. Am I missing something?
Just saw Jolie's last comment and sent her a mail to try to get into the beta trial!!
To make sure I will accomplish that also sent the "begging thing" to Mixero. :)