Back in July, we wrote about TweetMixx, the new service from social voting site Mixx that allows you find relevant links on Twitter. Starting tomorrow, the service will be opened up to the public. And in anticipation of that, the service got a last-minute revamp this weekend to make sure it’s ready.The results are good, but there’s still a question of if TweetMixx can take off in an increasingly crowded field.
As we noted previously, once you log-in with your Twitter credentials via OAuth, the service scans the tweets of the people you follow for links. Rather than trying to make you decipher a long URL or worse, a short URL, to know what the content is, TweetMixx pulls out the title, to let you know what you’re going to click on in plain English (or whatever language the link is in). You can also easily retweet any item or see that link’s details on Mixx.com in this main TweetMixx stream.
On top of showing off the links from your friends, you can also view all the tweets (including those without links), just as you would on Twitter.com. And you can update your status from TweetMixx. As a straight-up Twitter client, it’s not a bad one, as it’s fast, and the plain-English link idea is a pretty nice one. There’s also an area to basically saved filtered searches for links you may be particularly interested in. Saved filtered searches are nothing new for Twitter clients, but the link angle is again, a nice one.
The problem will be getting people to use TweetMixx rather than the current favorite TweetMeme for Twitter link discovery. I think much of what TweetMixx offers is actually more compelling than TweetMeme (the personalized links on top of the popular links section), but TweetMeme controls the all-important retweet button right now across the web, and as such has the mindshare for links on Twitter.
And then there’s the wildcard that is gearing up to enter the race: Bit.ly. As the default URL shortener for Twitter, Bit.ly already has a ton of interesting link data that it will apparently soon use for some kind of link discovery site of its own.
Still, TweetMixx is definitely worth taking for a spin if you’re particularly interested in links your friends are sharing, or those for particular queries. And the fact that it can be used as a pretty nice looking Twitter client on top of a link aggregator is a bonus.
