Using Mixtweet for a better #FollowFriday

Follow Friday is an opportunity for people on Twitter to reccomend who to follow. You simply tweet out the names of the people you want to recommend and tag it with #followfriday so that it shows up in Twitter's search. #followfriday always becomes a trending topic.

The problem is however, you only have 140 characters to work with, less because you have to put the #followfriday tag. So that limits the number of people you can recommend in one tweet. People often clutter up their timeline with several tweets of the people they recommend. For people who are reading the tweets, they need to laborioulsy click on each recommended person individually and read through their timeline.

Mixtweet offers the perfect solution. Create a list of the people you recommend and then link to it. Done. No limits to the number of people on your list and you can add to it each week or create a new list for each followfriday. Plus everyone can see all the updates for the people you recommend in one place, live. For example, here's @therealcherilyn's Follow Friday list:

Can you imagine how many tweets it would take to recommend this list of people?!

Featured Twitter List: Attachment Parenting

Today's featured list comes from the other side of the world, where a Mom named Zoey blogs about parenting from Australia. She created a mix called Attachment Parenting and since none of us here at the office have children we figured we'd reach out to her to find out what Attachment Parenting is. (As if we knew what parenting is about, ahem.).

Here's what Zoey said:

Attachment parenting was a phrase coined by Dr Sears and is a parenting style based on understanding your child's emotional and physical needs and responding sensitively to those needs. It promotes the idea that by developing a strong and trusting relationship with your children you are fostering their independence and emotional development. There are no 'rules' of attachment parenting - it is all about following your instincts but this can often include responding to your baby's cries, demand breastfeeding, extended breastfeeding, babywearing, cosleeping, using gentle ways to get your baby to sleep and minimising separation from your baby in the early years.

The fourteen people on the list are people selected by Zoey who have identified themslves as atttachment parents. Have kids? Have kids on the way? Follow the stream for a few days and you might just become an attachment parent yourself!

Click the widget above for an expanded view of the list.

Thanks for the list, Zoey. For more about what's parenting like in Australia (our guess is it's probably not too different from here in the States!), visit her blog goodgoog.com.

Featured Twitter List: Sheddies

One of the great things about creating a social Twitter list site is that it harnesses the collective expertise of the Twittersphere and hopefully passes along that knowledge to others. Today we learned what a shed is from Mixtweet user, unclewilco who created a list, simply called "Sheddies". According to his bio he is "Head sheddie of readersheds.co.uk and www.shedblog.co.uk".

What are sheddies, you ask? Well they are people who live in tricked out garden sheds and apparently there are quite a few of them, and more than a handful who actually tweet as well. Enough so that they even have a Shed Of the Year Contest. Check out the 2009 Finalists. This year's winner, The Kite Cabin, is five meters square.

Nice mix, unclewilco!

Click here for the expanded view of the list

"Clip" Tweets to read them later

It's common to be following several groups of people at the same time and sometimes you want to just be able to just scan through everyone's updates before diving in deep. The clip feature on Mixtweet facilitates this by letting you quickly save the tweets you are interested in for later so you don't get distracted from what you're doing and they don't get buried in the stream.

You can clip any tweet on the site and it will be stored in your clips folder in the order you've clipped them.

When you're done reading a clipped tweet, simply unclip it. Clips do not expire so you can read them at your leisure.

Featured Twitter List: Alyssa Milano's Recommended Follows

Alyssa Milano is one of the most prolific celebrities on Twitter but a lot of her updates are actually retweets of things she reads or are sent to her. Where does she get all this information? One source is from the people she's following. Last friday, as part of #followfriday, she tweeted a list of suggested people to follow and no, they're not made up of Charmed costars, gal pals and other celebrities. It's actually a diverse list of people covering the gamut from news sources, to tech bloggers, to Twitter how to's and of course Tommy Lasorda (she's a big Dodgers fan).

Put it this way - you'll never be bored. Thanks for the list, Alyssa!

Click here for the expanded view of the list

Introducing Mixtweet

The first time we signed up for Twitter we stared at an empty friends list. Nobody likes a vacuum, so we immediately started adding everyone we could - people we knew, people Twitter recommended, and anyone else who posted an @ in front of their names in blog posts.

But then something bad started happening - we couldn't keep up with everyone's tweets. In short, we were suffering from timeline overload and that quickly led to Twitter Paralysis.

Mixtweet.com is the cure for Twitter Paralysis.

You can group whoever you want (following or not) into Twitter Lists and then manage/ keep up on everyone's updates in an interface designed specifically for this.

For example, let's say you've created several lists. Mixtweet will show you all of them under "My Lists" (see screenshot below) and next to each one, there's a count to show you how many updates have come in, in real-time.

Making a mix is a breeze

Mixtweet offers many ways to add people to your mixes:

• Manually typing in their names
  
• Adding them from your lists of friends by clicking on the "+" icon
  
• Adding them from other lists you see on the site by clicking on the "+" icon

Share your creations

Once you've created a list, you can share them via the popular social network and bookmark sites. You can also customize and embed a widget on any website. For example, here's a widget showing Breaking News headlines from 12 different sources:

Discover lists on a wide range of topics

Creating lists to help you overcome Twitter Paralysis is only part of what Mixtweet is about. The other part is being able to discover what other lists people are creating on topics you might be interested in. If you tag your list, it will show up in our directory for people to find under the Explore tab. This is a great resource for if you're new to Twitter and don't know who to follow or if you're just looking for new people to follow. You can save any list and manage them the same way as lists you've created. Best of all, there's no commitment - following people is optional.

In the coming days, we'll be covering some other ways Mixtweet makes your life easier. Stay tuned.

About Us

Mixtweet was created by the folks at Bandwidth Productions, Inc who also created the popular music playlist site, FIQL.com.