We Come Bearing Gifts!

After all, ’tis the season for giving, and we have something that everyone can celebrate! Here’s what’s in our bag of goodies:

Public Groups
More than 25% of you are members of at least one of the hundreds of Mixx Private Groups that have been created. Now when you create a group, you can opt to have it accessible to the entire Mixx community. “But why?” you ask, and that’s the sort of excellent question we’ve come to expect from such an exceedingly intelligent and attractive community. So here’s why this is such a cool new feature:

• Mixx Public groups are a great tool for specific topics such as a favorite sports team, PTA group, interest group or other organization. They’re also ideal for some small businesses, trade groups, grass roots organizations, etc.
• Public Groups offer a more social experience: In addition to commenting on particular stories in the usual way, Mixxers will also be able to carry on a conversation on the “Soapbox” outside of the comment areas you’re already used to.
• Each Public Group will have a leader board with daily awards for both the Top Submitter and the Thought Leader in that group.
• Want to cozy up with other group members (and no, we don’t mean in an “I’m looking for a date” kind of way)? Just browse other Mixxers’ profiles using their avatars.
• We’ve created additional tools for the group administrator—including the ability to set a welcome message and create rules for that particular group. (Please note that this will in no way change or replace the Mixx Terms of Use)
• The group administrator retains control over just how public the group is: Can a non-group member see everything that goes on in the group? Or will you share only the group description? Or just the headlines for all submitted content? Of course, you’ll still get to decide whether it’s invite-only or if any Mixxer can join.
• Other Mixxers will also be able to search for public groups (but NOT private ones) and we’ll list the most active public groups on the Mixx main page and everyone’s YourMixx pages.

Limited time offer for existing groups! If you currently have a private group that you want to move out to the public realm, drop us a line at groups@mixx.com. Just make sure all the admins agree to move it public. Otherwise it might be like the time your friend “accidentally” showed your fiancée a videotape of your bachelor party—not cool. Just send us that note in the next couple of weeks.

What, you want more? Well, in the spirit of the season:

Email Digests
It’s here! You asked and we’ve been working overtime to get you the once-a-day update of all activity on Mixx—who Friended you, any comments on your submissions, group activity, and whatever else has been clogging up your in-box.

Address Book Importer
Want an easier way to invite your friends to join you in a group on Mixx? Use our new Address Book Importer, which works with the four largest email providers. Just type in your email address, with the domain name, and we’ll get them lined up for an invite to your group!

On-deck
Are you one of those people who must, must find the good stuff before anyone else does? We are, so we’re introducing this cool new feature that will let you see the content that is close to crossing into the Popular category. These stories will be nicely lined up under the “Recent” tab. To go along with this, you’ll also be able to see how long ago a particular item became popular. Alas, we still can’t tell you why people vote the way they do. If we could we’d be much more popular in political circles.

Duplicates
We’ve ramped up the duplicate checker to catch more duplicates. This should relieve some work for the duplicate Neighborhood Watch who have been diligently reporting those cases where our duplicate check was falling down on the job. And while we’re very thankful for their hard work–it shouldn’t have to be the job of the community to do what our computers should be doing!

As always with our new stuff, we’d love to hear what you think. Just drop a line to feedback.

That should be enough to keep you busy for a while, but we’ll be back in January with more treats. So however and wherever you’re celebrating the New Year, make it happy and safe, and know that we’re thinking of you!

The Mixx Team

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Mixx. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.