Twitip

If you follow a lot of people on Twitter, you have probably already faced an information overload problem. When choosing who to follow, you would probably read their recent tweets and decide if the person is interesting to you. But not all the people always tweet about something as important or interesting for you as when you decided to follow them.

As the number of people you follow grows, the number of junk tweets that you get in your Friends Timeline grows as much or even faster. So after a time, you end up with never ending stream of some tweets most of which are not even close to what you actually hoped to read. The situation gets worse when the people you follow are your friends and you don’t want to offend them by clicking the ‘Unfollow’ button.

The client software currently available for incorporating Twitter on your desktop (such as TweetDeck) is much better at dealing with the noise problem than the conventional web interface. Some of them feature multiple columns for different stream sources, other allow some limited filtering, but no complex solution has been available for a long time. The recently released Mixero Twitter client has come with a number of tools specially crafted to serve those who want to get rid of the noise and information overload once and for ever.

The major new concept used in Mixero is a concept of an ActiveList. ActiveList allows you to choose a number of sources that are really important for you at the time. Tweets from these are sources form a so-called ActiveList Timeline. The sources may be a particular user, a group of users, or a channel.

Keyword filters can be applied to each individual source. So for example, If I want to read all tweets from @problogger, then all tweets from the group of my friends that talk about ‘girls’ keyword, and also monitor what’s happening around Apple’s iPad, I can easily set up it in my ActiveList: I add @problogger, then add Friends group and apply a keyword filter (‘girls’) to it, then I add a channel with the keyword ‘iPad’ and I’m done. Now I will only get the tweets that I really want to get. Furthermore, I can save my ActiveList and come back to it later. They are interchanged in one click. The saved ActiveLists are called the Contexts. Contexts are synchronized via Mixero server across all instances of Mixero across all platforms, so I can easily create one at home on PC and then continue using it at work on my Mac.

And If I’m at work, when I don’t have much time to read the tweets, I can switch Mixero to the so-called Avatars Mode when Mixero hides itself only leaving the ActiveList avatars visible with balloons showing events like tweets or DMs from them.

Mixero is really a step forward in reducing the noise in Twitter streams. With it’s innovative approach and proper development, it will make the life of active Twitter users much easier by providing a number of useful tools to manage incoming tweets and fish out important information avoiding the overload problem.