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.

Now, we can already hear the cries—”What the #@%*! Mixx is spamming me!” Truth be told, we’re only sending Mixx Picks to users who have “Stay up to date with Mixx!” checked in their Account Settings. If you don’t wish to receive Mixx Picks, unsubscribing is as simple as going to your Account Settings and unchecking that box.

As mentioned above, this is something we’re testing out, and depending upon your feelings about it, we may or may not continue Mixx Picks. We think it’s pretty cool and we hope you do, too. Definitely let us know what you think. If you didn’t receive the premiere issue, you can view it online.

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.

The amazing community we’ve been blessed with on Mixx has been showing the love to CNN from the beginning. We have over 1000 CNN stories, photos and videos submitted and more than 15% of them have been voted as a top story on the site.

Again, welcome to CNN, and a big thank you to our community! Look for our press release coming later today.

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.

So, we had a little meeting and asked ourselves, “What do we do with so many Mixxers offering up so much of their time to help us create a better experience—not to mention the many others who have great ideas for what to do with Mixx data?” Some people might think these users presumptuous, but for us, there was only one answer: open the borders.

That’s right—we’ve launched our API! Want to check it out? Just head down to the Kitchen and click on the new Blender link. If you’re already a Mixx user, this is the place to check out the cool applications and websites designed by your fellow Mixxers to be used in conjunction with Mixx. If you’re a developer, use the Blender to whip up and manage API keys and brag about your cool new Mixx app.

You know we like to stuff our releases with as many new features as possible, so we’re also launching… Recommended By.

We have a long and growing list of splentacularific® partner sites that have launched Mixx buttons to make it easier for you to Mixx their content. Starting today, we’re going to show you a bit more information from the readers of those sites, including the type of content they recommend. Go to a story from one of these partner sites and you’ll see a counter with the number of people who have recommended that story. Now, before you get your knickers in a twist—we know what you’re thinking and NO!, this number has absolutely NO bearing on a story’s popularity on Mixx. Even if 50,000 YouTubers think that a video of two cats in a marathon stare-down is Just the Cutest Thing Ever! and decide to recommend it, unless Mixxers agree, it won’t stroll to the top of the Popular list. The counter exists simply to let you know that 50,000 YouTube users think that particular bit of, er, creativity is worth your time. As ever, only Mixxers get to decide the true popularity of any piece of content.

YAURF!™ (Yet Another User Request Fulfilled!)
From the minute we launched, Mixxers have been requesting, demanding and politely begging for an RSS feed for YourMixx. Joe, who brought you MixxMash by working his special blend of wizardry, now offers a MixxMash RSS feed! Individually configured for each Mixxer, the feed can be activated by going to the Cook’s Corner in the Kitchen and clicking “Activate your MixxMash RSS feed.”

This should be enough you keep you busy for a couple of hours, but there’s much more on the way! Let us know what you think of the new features and keep sending us your comments and suggestions for improvements and new features you’d like to see.

Have we told you lately that we love you?

Your Mixx Team

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):

• Thanks to JNBammer, a “Career” category in Business
• Thanks to m4tt, a “Google” category in Tech (and in return, m4tt wrote a nice thank you note to us!)
• Thanks to NaturalWoman, a submit button on the Search Results page so you can submit directly from there after searching for duplicates.
• Thanks Pleeker, RobDiana, Calinazaret, Tunisian Guy and Yoda among others, improvements to the way Breaking News is presented. You can now see “Almost Breaking” news that one SuperMixxer has flagged as breaking. Making it easier for news to break, and giving credit to the SuperMixxers who are flagging breaking news.T
• Thanks Camille, a much better link to “Edit Your Mixx.”
• For CMcGill, we moved the “add everything” option on the “Add To YourMixx” widget to the bottom of the list.
• For MarkCarras, we moved the “Email This” link back to where it used to be on the story/photo/video pages.

And a couple of things we found:

• On your profile, under your “Voted for” tab, you now only see things you voted for that you didn’t submit.
• We cleaned up some problems with our story clustering feature related to groups.
• We also fixed a bug causing votes within groups to be counted incorrectly.

Finally, we introduce The Cook’s Corner. This can be found in the Kitchen section in the Mixx footer. In The Cook’s Corner, you’ll see some links (more coming) to some experimental stuff our engineers have cooked up in their spare time. Yes, even with all the above stuff going on, they still find time to play around. We are especially interested in what you think of some of the stuff there!

Think that covers it, but if you find other stuff we did, be sure to let us know!

We’ve had the ability to “favorite” a Mixx item for a while now and thought it’d be a good time to take a look at what we’ve favorited. If you’re unfamiliar with this feature, here’s the rundown.

On any Mixx item’s page (the one with all the details, comments, etc.), you’ll notice a small star next to the item’s title. Clicking on that will mark that Mixx item as a favorite. Clicking it again will remove it as a favorite. Simple as that! If you browse over to your profile page (or any other Mixxer’s profile page, for that matter), you’ll see a Favorites tab that collects these favorited items.

Over here at Mixx HQ, we took a look at the things we consider favorites and here’s what we came up with:

• Chris gets a good laugh out of some Social Blend / Star Wars shenanigans.
• Kerry’s stoked about quality photography and Soundgarden.
• Kori finds it exceptionally funny when mascots do stupid things.
• Will knows what Rick Astley Would Never do.
• Joe prefers a little blasphemy.
• Jason is terrified of Zombies on the Orange line.
• Bill would rather be on vacation and swimming in the crystal clear water.
• Jeff loves Radiohead playing live in Paris in 2001.
• Mike appreciates Brattleboro’s vote to arrest Bush and Cheney.
• Alex got a laugh out of this subtle bra ad.
• Nathaniel loves this video of Optimus Prime showing off his sweet dance moves.

So now we ask you, loyal Mixxers, what is your favorite favorite?