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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

That’s right! There are so many things going on around here that we just couldn’t keep it all in one blog—so we’ve started two more:

Mixx Picks: It’s been getting more difficult to narrow our Mixx Picks down to the two or three we usually send out—particularly because so many people have something cool they want to add. So there’s just been too much to confine to the occasional email update. But we’ve got it covered: Every day a member of your Mixx Team will post the stuff they’ve found to be interesting, inspiring, hilarious, strange, witty, strange—well not too strange; we do have our TOU to think about, after all! . . . but you get the idea.

Hello, awesome Mixx Community!

You may have noticed that we’ve been a little quiet lately. Besides our release of Mixx Communities, we haven’t given you too many goodies in quite some time. We’re changing that.

It’s not like we’re ready for a walker yet, but we have to admit that parts of Mixx are starting to show their age. Well, OK, one part: the Mixx Tour was cobbled together just before we launched and because we’ve had a few changes and added a lot of new features, the Tour needs an overhaul. Or, to put it plainly, with more than 2 million people visiting Mixx each month, it needs to be tossed out and replaced. We put this little project on the pile for several Mixx Team members but got the hairy eyeball from one too many of them—something about being busy building other cool features for you. So that’s where you come in, dear Mixxers!

While some might say it is impossible, we managed to do it all the same. We broke karma. For everyone, everywhere.  On Wednesday, with our introduction of Mixx Communities, we broke the super-secret algorithm for how karma is assigned. As a result, some of our users have accumulated insane amounts of karma in just a few days; others were not assigned the karma they were due.  That seemed sort of against the idea of karma in the first place, so we’re going to work this afternoon to get everyone’s karma back in balance so all can be right in the Mixx world again.

Thanks to everyone for making our Communities launch such a success

~Team Mixx

We’ve been a tad quiet for a couple of weeks and at last we’re ready to emerge from our cave and tell you why! Today we’re taking our mantra of ultra-personalization to a whole new level with the launch of Mixx Communities. You may have already noticed that the “Groups” tab in your navigation bar has been replaced with a shiny new “Communities” tab. All of your Groups are still there and will reside under this tab but we’ve added Mixx Communities, which some here have described as “Mixx Groups on steroids.”

Hi everyone~

Stay tuned as we go into upgrade mode and release a big new feature that we’ve been working on. We expect Mixx to be unavailable between 4am ET and 5am ET while we do this install. Watch the blog for a new update once the site is back up and available!

UPDATE:   We’re back up and running and already see our awesome Mixxers using some of our new features. Very exciting for us here at MixxHQ.  And TechCrunch already has a review of us too.  Feeling rather sheepish, we’ll get back to work finishing up our own blog post. Look back in a little while!

~Team Mixx

Back in January, we launched Mixx for the iPhone, a spare time project I threw together using some of the Mixx RSS feeds. Response was generally positive with the major critique being that it wasn’t terribly feature rich. Today I’m happy to announce we’ve launched some updates to Mixx for the iPhone.

Now we know that, because you are the most intelligent community on the Internet, you just did a quick calculation and decided that we must have made a mistake—“Mixx is only, what, 7.5 months old?” you ask. And in a sense, you would be correct. But we actually began building Mixx one year ago; it just took a little time before we were ready to show off our Beta. And because for us it has been a year, we thought a little recap was in order.

Hey everyone, it’s Will and I wanted to write up a quick post to let everyone know about Mixx’s integration with Lijit (oh, and I could not resist the title of the post, sorry for the MC Hammer reference). Lijit’s recent enhancements to their widget are really cool and includes Mixx as one of their content sources. For those of you that are not familiar with Lijit, they “enhance the way your readers search for and discover information on the internet by using the power of people, their content, and their connections.

We may have mentioned once or twice how crazy we are about Twitter. Mixx is on Twitter. Everyone who works here is on Twitter. A lot of you have been on Twitter from the very beginning. So we know you’ll be happy! ecstatic! overjoyed! to find that any story, photo or video that you Mixx publicly can now be simultaneously Tweeted.

Hi everyone, Jason here with a quick note about something new we’re sending out on a trial basis. We’re calling it Mixx Picks—a somewhat-regular email newsletter featuring a handful of stories, photos and videos curated by the Mixx staff. Our goal is to pick out some of the cool, yet potentially overlooked, items that come across the site.

As you may have heard, later today, CNN will be launching “Mixx It” buttons on all of their stories. CNN is the gold standard of news, both online and broadcast, and we’re excited to have them recognize us as being a  growing presence in the social media space. CNN realizes that the Mixx community is a unique offering: a system that allows all content to be socialized into relevant human viewing circles through tags, personalization, and groups.

Some people think that if you drive your employees too hard that, well, it’s a bad thing. Obviously, they’re not thinking about engineers. A strange and magical breed, engineers prefer that we show our affection and appreciation by giving them more work. So we keep them busy and happy by implementing loads of improvements—many dreamed up by our product managers, many suggested by you. In fact, several Mixxers have even offered to help out with our coding.