Mixx Puts Breaking News In To Social Media

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.

But, of course, they have a point. Timeliness has long been a problem with social news sites—Mixx included—and is a result of what also makes social news sites great: the voting process. In order for something to reach a lot of people, it has to get a decent number of votes and get kicked into “Popular” for a category, meaning it can take a while to get out in front. Breaking news, however, is something you want to know about while it’s still breaking (rather than once it’s been swept into the trashcan).

As Mixx is just shy of six months old, you’ll forgive our excitement and pride as we announce that we’ve come up with a brilliantly simple fix to a problem four years in the making: The Mixx “Breaking News” category. When a big story hits, any of our Super Mixxers can tag it as “Breaking.” You’ll find these stories on the right-hand side of both the “Popular” and “News” categories. You can also subscribe to “Breaking News” on YourMixx. Though we don’t expect it to happen often, if nothing appears in these spaces, don’t panic! Mixx is not broken; it’s just a slow news day.

Here’s how it works:

• Only Super Mixxers can tag a story as “Breaking.” If you haven’t achieved Super Mixxer status, just keep Mixxing: add great content, vote and comment—you’ll get there! (For more info, check out the Super Mixxer FAQ.)
• It takes two to Mixx a Breaking News story. Two Super Mixxers, that is.
• Only a limited number of stories can be in the Breaking News category at any one time, and only for a limited time.
• Once a Breaking News story gets enough votes, it will move over to “Popular,” and to any other category with which it was tagged (entertainment, politics, science, etc.).
• Right now, only text stories can be marked as “Breaking,” but we are working on this capability for photos and videos.

Oh, and we almost forgot to mention. If there is breaking news on a day, the Mixxer who submitted in the highest vote-getting bit of breaking news will get a brand new award: the News Hound award . You can check the Mixx Lounge daily to see who the News Hound with the biggest scoop was!

In addition to this big news, we’ve also made a couple of other tweaks:

• The response to the “On Deck” feature was amazing and many, many of you asked us to make it easier to get to. How’s one click? That’s right—instead of residing under “Recent,” we’ve given “On Deck” its own tab!
• Several Mixxers also asked for a way to see the top stories, photos and videos from the last day, so we’ve changed the time filter options on the “Popular” tab from “Day, Week, Ever” to “Now, Last Day, Last Week, Ever.”

Well, that’s all we have today, but there’s more coming soon. Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Use the Feedback link—you know we love hearing from you! Now excuse us while we go and pat ourselves on the back again!

Your Mixx Team

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 4:11 am 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.