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Just about a month ago, we kicked off our birthday party by asking you to chime in and let us know where you’d like to see Mixx go in our second year. We asked for your Wish List o’ Features and then, as a community, you voted for the three you most wanted to see. In return, we promised that we’d get them up and running by the end of the year. Not surprisingly, you had opinions to express and now we have features to tout!

So without further ado, here’s where we stand:

My how time does fly! Because we’ve come so far in such a short period of time it’s hard to believe that Mixx launched to public beta one year ago today.

For this One Year post, we’d like to start off by thanking you all for helping us grow our community at such a staggering rate. You are the reason it’s so much fun for us to come to work each day.

So, in celebration of the Mixx community’s first birthday, we thought that we’d recap why we created Mixx in the first place, just how far we’ve come and how we continue to differentiate Mixx from our competitors. We’ll also touch on where we see the future of social media going and, of course, fill you in on a few new goodies coming your way!

Wow! Have we gone off the radar or what? It’s been almost a month since our last post, but you know where we’ve been—working, working, working! We have some cool new features and upgrades to share, so let’s get right to it:

There are some pieces of Mixx that haven’t changed since we launched just under a year ago or the changes have been so slight that we’re probably the only ones that noticed them. We’re changing that today–and it’s step one of some other revisits we have on the docket.

Up today, our old friend the View Details page. Also called the story page. Or the permalink page. Call it what you will, its got a new look today.

We left our engineers with some time on a Friday afternoon recently and they came up with these really cool charts showing some interesting activity around stories and votes and activity. We decided to share this coolness with our entire audience. When we went to do so, though, we realized that we needed an overall redesign.

August is traditionally a slow news month, but that’s not going to stop us from letting you in on a few tweaks we’ve made to Mixx! Besides if we share these now, we’ll have more time to focus on the post-Labor Day goodies we have in store.

Mixxers are chatty people and getting chattier every day. And no, we’re not complaining, this is a good thing! So we’ve come up with a few new tricks for managing—and rewarding—comments. And of course, it wouldn’t be a Mixx release without a few other goodies, too. There’s a lot to talk about, so lets get to it:

Comments

Earlier this week, conn+ipedia had its public launch. It is a wiki designed for those working for the common good as a place to share knowledge and connect around People, Places and Things. It's a new kind of wiki, built on Wagn, that combines wiki with database functionality. Here are some links to get you started:

Read some of my thoughts on what I learned from the development process of connec+ipedia!

mis•cel•la•ny
pronounced mis-uh-ley-nee
a miscellaneous collection or group of various or somewhat unrelated items.

Or, in Mixx terms, our mixxcellany release. First, and most importantly, a number of user requests (and props to their suggestors):

Mixxers are a tidy bunch of people, as you may have guessed by the many instances of paired comments: the actual comment followed by the apology for typos in the original. So you’ll be happy to know that we’ve come up with a way for you to put a little extra polish on your work:

…we really are launching one new feature this morning.

Head to a user’s profile and you’ll see something fun–we now offer an RSS feed that lets you subscribe to a user’s submissions and comments.

See, all you had to do was ask, and we delivered.

Now go play a real April Fool’s Day joke on someone!

Don’t tell anyone, but there is way too much cool stuff stashed in the Mixx categories. At least that’s what our resident news junkies tell us—something about forgetting to check the news until it was no longer, well, news. We admit that we were too busy catching up on the latest celebrity gossip NASA research to pay much attention.

We’ll be doing an update to Mixx this morning! We’ve been tinkering with Mixx Mail. Why? Because we’re not fans of the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” (and not only because we once had our knuckles rapped for saying “ain’t”). So we’ve made a few upgrades and we think you’ll like what we’ve done.

We’ve been hearing a lot about this little thing called Facebook and thought we’d check it out. It’s pretty cool and wow! were we surprised to see so many of you over there! Just kidding, of course—we’ve been working on a Facebook app for a while now, and we’re happy to say that it’s up and running, and ready for you to share with your Facebook friends!

So now you don’t have to leave Facebook to submit, comment on and share content from around the web, and you can share with your Facebook and your Mixx Friends at the same time. And by setting your Facebook Interests you’ll get the stuff you want delivered right to your profile page.

You may have noticed we dressed up this morning as we added a few things:

• New way to report related assets that aren’t really related
• A new SuperMixxer badge on SuperMixxer’s profiles
• A ShareThis link on story pages that lets you submit the mixx page to Facebook, del.icio.us, etc.

And with that, we’ll wish you a Happy Monday and head back to work!
~The Mixx Team

We’ve always said we have the best community out there, and that’s due in part to how well you communicate with one another—and with us. Today we’re launching two new features that will make it even easier!

Mixx Mail Phase 1: Now you can send and receive messages to and from anyone in the community without ever leaving the Mixx. Mixx Mail offers some very handy little features, including: