Twitter is great, but even Twitter addicts admit the amount of noise can be deafening. Sure, there’s lot of great people and useful information, but to get to the good stuff you have to sift through a ton of mindless self-promotion and general pointlessness. I’m not saying I agree with Jay Leno (who is on the record calling Twitter “pointless babble,” just that it can be difficult and time-consuming to celebrate the wheat from the chaff.

Fortunately, there are third-party apps galore that make using Twitter easier and more fun. We’ve reviewed many of them, but Mixero, which is still in private beta, is one of the coolest I’ve seen so far. Mixero has just about everything you could want in a Twitter client.  You can group the people you follow into different groups and then add both groups and individual contacts into different “contexts” like work or home.

Mixero gives you the option to view all of the tweets in your timeline at once, only view tweets from specific groups and to filter tweets based on keywords.  When you find an interesting tweet, you can reply or retweet with a single click.

You can also create “channels”  to follow different topics, keywords and brands.  All of this is pretty standard for a Twitter client, but Mixero goes even further.  For example,  you can translate tweets that are in a different language. You can preview pictures and see screenshots from videos. Plus, you can expand a short URL simply by hovering your cursor over it. Oh, and you can easily use Twitpic, Posterous or Twitgoo for multimedia support.

Another spiffy Mixero feature…you can set global filters that block incoming tweets containing specific keywords. I immediately blocked the keyword “affiliate.” Awesome! You can also block tweets from specific users if they are polluting your Twitterstream.

Mixero also has an “Avatars” mode, which uses Twitter avatars from the people you are currently watching to notify you of new tweets while you do something else. The avatars are lined up on the right-hand side of your screen, along with the number of unread tweets from each of them. This would be cool if there were a way to reposition the avatars, but there isn’t, and as it is the first one is always directly on top of my browser’s search box. That’s not cool…being able to access the search box is kind of important to me.

Mixero’s user interface is really slick, but it’s kind of hard to figure out what everything does at first. I suggest watching the tutorial video before you try to use it.  Once you figure it out  and get everything set up, it’s really cool. There are only three things keeping me from switching over from Hootsuite.  First, although there is multi-account support, you have to have a separate private beta invitation code for each account.  I’ll have to wait for beta invites from my other accounts before I can really switch over.

Second, there is no way to schedule tweets for a later time. Third, Hootsuite has a handy bookmarklet that makes it easy to tweet cool pages as you browse the internet. Mixero does not.

That aside, Mixero is pretty cool.  Once I get invites for my other accounts, I’ll probably use it in conjunction with Hootsuite. You can request a beta invite by following them on Twitter.

What do you think of Mixero? How does it stack up against your favorite Twitter clients?

Our Rating of Mixero

Tags: Twitter

Categories:social