Are you as glad to see Friday as we are? It’s been a long but exciting week for your Mixxologists, so we thought we’d end it with a little celebration. No, no. Not a margarita party. Someone snitched and we “lost” the margarita machine. Something about a missing beverage license. But we do have some other cool stuff on tap!

Fun With Mixx
We’ve added a couple of things to the “Fun with Mixx” section, which you’ll find at the bottom of every page but this one.

• MixxMerch is open for business! Head over to CafePress.com for the Mixx stuff you’ve been waiting for! Well, some of it, anyway: The store is a work in progress, so the layout isn’t yet where we want it to be, and right now, we have only one design. There is more to come, but we’ve been busy making a better Mixx, and that will always take priority. But don’t let that stop you from showing us a little love. Hey, we gotta pay the bills somehow!
• If you’ve been hanging around the Mixx Lounge during the last three months, you may have noticed that Tamar has been hogging the “Most Contentious” award. We thought this was a little odd, so we did a bit of digging and found a bug that just made her contentious. Forever. Oops. So with many apologies to Tamar, we’ve fixed the bug, and now someone else has a chance at the Most Contentious award. Any takers?
• Now you can follow our Tweets on Twitter and keep even closer tabs on what we’re up to!

Changes to Groups
We made a few changes, which we think will make it a lot easier to find and browse Groups.

• You’ll now find Groups in the site navigation—no more hunting!
• There’s a new “Submit” button right on the Group page to make it easier to share content.
• A new Find Groups page lets you browse through an A-Z listing of all the Groups available on the site. So whether you’re looking for fellow Star Wars geeks or other David Hasselhoff fans, it’ll be a lot less time consuming.
• We’ve added the ability to tag items privately, so they’re seen within a group and only within that group. This should make it easier to browse content within larger groups.
• “Recently Active” groups have been moved from YourMixx to Popular.

One More Thing
We also redesigned the layout of the second step of the “Submit” page to take advantage of the new private tags. We think it flows a little better, but let us know if you disagree!

One last little thing we managed to squeeze in this week: Many, many Mixxers had asked to have award badges to stay on their profiles longer, and now they will! After all, you worked hard to get those awards, and now you can keep the bragging rights a bit longer.

Now if you’ll excuse us, we have to go and mix up something cold and tasty.

Have a great weekend and we’ll see you in the Mixx!

The Mixx Team

Two cool things to talk about this morning!

First, our partner, Reuters, has recently updated their site to add “Submit to Mixx” buttons on their photos and photo slideshows. Reuters has an army of photographers that take amazing pictures. Be sure to regularly check out their Editor’s Choices!

Just click on the “Share” button and choose to mixx either the one picture you are looking at, or the entire slideshow. We continue to be very excited have Reuters as a partner!

Second, the good folks over at Socialize Me! have taken it upon themselves to add Mixx as one of their options for their WordPress plugin. First off we want to give them a huge shout out for including us, and second, we encourage you to hop on over to their website and install their plugin. It rocks!

Imagine one of your articles has been submitted to Mixx. You’re getting a steady stream of visitors to your blog. You could really connect with some of these visitors—if you knew who they were. Well here’s the thing, with Socialize Me!, those visitors to your blog will see a simple message when they arrive: “Hi, thanks for the visit! Joe’s on Mixx, too!” with a link to your profile.

This gives you the biggest bang for your buck. Not only are your blog posts being submitted to Mixx, but when a Mixx user comes to your blog to read the post, you kindly greet them with a welcome message and a link to your Mixx profile. What a sweet deal.

According to the Socialize Me! instructions, if you’re a seasoned blogger, then the installation is very easy — just download the Socialize Me! Plugin, uncompress the file (if your system doesn’t do that for you) and upload the file into the Plugins folder on your server.

For those who’re new or less familiar with WordPress, a Plugin installation guide for WordPress might be what you’re looking for.

Configuration:

• Pay a visit to your WordPress account and sign-in to your Dashboard.
• Click on the Options tab.
• Click on the “Socialize Me!” tab on the sub-menu.
• Enter your usernames, IDs and profiles into the relevant fields.
• Add the code into your “single.php” page (see figure 1, or click here for the code) — you’re free to place the code where you like!

Good morning, everyone! A quick announcement for you to enjoy over breakfast (or brunch, or lunch, depending on where and when you are).

We’re pleased to announce the launch of Mixx for the iPhone. This is a version 0.1-ish, so there will be more features coming down the line real soon. Currently, you can view the top ten most popular stories on Mixx. This is great if you’re on the go and need that quick Mixx Fix (Fixx?).

The next version (which should be available in the coming weeks) will be ramped up with more stories, photos, and videos, vote counts, thumbnails, and more information about individual items. Like Mixx, Mixx for the iPhone is a work in progress, and we’ll continue to add and improve features over time. We’d also like to know what features you’d like to see. Let us know in the comments!

If you have an iPhone, check out Mixx at http://i.mixx.com/.

Jay from Shareaholic dropped us a note this weekend to let us know that he added Mixx to Shareaholic, an awesome Firefox extension. Shareaholic now lets you easily submit stories, photos and videos to Mixx. No more cutting and pasting! Its especially great if you are using other social media sites like StumbleUpon or del.icio.us.

Shareaholic has some other great features, as Mashable pointed out in their recent update, including the ability share via email and some tracking tools.

After installing Shareaholic, click on Customize:

Select Mixx from the options:

And you are now all set to Mixx!

Today Mixx has reached a milestone! This is our 100th day of being open to the public, and we never could have done it without you. We love our jobs, but you definitely make it a lot more fun to come in every day. We’ve always tried to keep you up-to-date with everything that’s going on, and we absolutely want to know what you think of us. So in that same spirit of openness, we give you:

The State of Mixx at 100 Days:

• We’re now averaging hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month
• There are tens of thousands of registered Mixxers – 78% of whom have personalized their Mixx pages with more than 10 category tags
• Mixxers have created more than 700 groups, and counting
• So far, more than 5 million votes have been cast
• We now have a library of more than 50,000 tags submitted by Mixxers
• Mixx buttons have been found on the websites of some of the biggest media companies, including USA Today , Reuters, The L.A. Times, Slate, Forecast Earth from The Weather Channel, and Kaboose, with more on the way
• And it’s not just the big dogs! Many very cool and interesting blogs have added a Mixx button, allowing Mixxers to get great information from diverse sources

One of the coolest things that we’ve seen at Mixx is the level of participation of all Mixxers. We can’t say it enough—as you may have noticed—but we’re incredibly humbled by the time and energy that you put in to making Mixx such a vibrant community. And it’s not just people registering and voting—though we definitely encourage that! It’s the people who create groups that bring so many of you together—from Digg Crossovers (one of the first) to Green News; Mixxing the Web (who knew that rats laugh when you tickle them?) to Tech News, and at least 697 others. It’s also efforts like the Mixxing Bowl, where users get together to come up with ideas to help us improve and to chat about other cool stuff. They’ve even making podcasts and videos about Mixx. (They’re doing a casting call for a female podcaster, if you’re interested!)

So what can you expect from our next 100 days? Well we can’t promise all of these within the next 100, but this is a bit of what we’re working on:

• A Mixx Facebook Application
• Open APIs so the geeks among you can get access to some mashable Mixx info. Show us what we haven’t thought of yet!
• Better Groups Functionality
• New Ways to Earn—and Award!—Karma
• Improved Awards Display
• Audio Section for Podcasts
• Improved Commenting
• Improved People Search
• SCHWAG! That’s right—we’re going retail! Soon you’ll be able to buy Mixx hats, t-shirts, and more!

So from all of us, a huge THANK YOU for hanging in there while we worked out the first-100-days kinks, and for sending us great suggestions and Feedback.

Here’s to another amazing leg of the journey, and we’ll see you back in the Mixx!

Chris McGill
Founder, Mixx