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.”

Mixx Communities offer an easier way to focus on the topics and issues that you’re most passionate about, whether that’s wildlife activism, social media, green news, political reform or the NY Giants. Once you start a Mixx Community, it will reside within Mixx but you can give it your own stamp by importing an image header and/or logo, choosing a custom color scheme, and determining specific topics and categories to include. For instance, if your Community is dedicated to environmental preservation, you might want to have as your topics “News,” “Science,” “Politics” and “Education.”

Your new Community will have the same benefits as a Mixx Group, with a few more bells and whistles. Well, OK, a lot more bells and whistles! You’ll have:

• Prominently placed space for your editorial and/or promotional content
• A sub-domain name
• The ability to import existing tags—this means that as soon as you’ve finished your set up, your Community will already have content
• The ability to embed video through YouTube and MetaCafé

Mixx is also excited to announce that, as part of our community offering, we will allow users the ability to participate in a revenue sharing program. The revenue sharing will be made possible by Mixx’s integration with the Google AdSense API.

The members of your Mixx Community also get some pretty cool benefits:

• A more customized experience
• More prominent message boards
• Karma points earned in the community are automatically added to their general Mixx karma pool (NOTE: Karma points are only added if the content is exclusive to the Community.)
• Improved comment following: Read the comments on a particular story across all groups, both public and private, that you are a member of.

Though it will take a little more time than setting up a Group, creating a Mixx Community is a simple, five-step process that any non-techy person can do. But if you’re not ready to go all out, Mixx Groups are a great way to get your feet wet. It takes just a couple of minutes to set up a Group and you’ll be on your way! Then whenever you’re ready to take the plunge, you can upgrade your Group to a Community.

We’re really excited about Mixx Communities and think they’re going to completely change how you use the web, so go check it out, and as always, please let us know what you think!

Your Mixx Team

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.

For this update, I drew inspiration from Auston Bunson’s iMixx web app (which is featured in The Blender). Auston’s approach split content up into stories, photos, and videos, whereas Mixx for the iPhone provided content from our top four categories. We all thought it’d be pretty cool to see content presented by media type, so that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Since Mixx for the iPhone v1, Bill kindly built us an API (that’s geek-speak for “cool thing that lets others mash up Mixx content”). This update to Mixx for the iPhone has made the switch over to the API which allows for pulling in more useful information like comments.

As I have spare time (a rarity around the Mixx offices, for sure!), I’ll add more features. The next things on my list are vote counts and adding navigation by category.

Hope all you iPhone users find this update useful and, as always, keep the feedback coming! You can load up Mixx for the iPhone at http://i.mixx.com/.

- Jason (Mixx user interface architect guy)

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.

Mixx came about because we envisioned a space where people of all different backgrounds and diverse interests could come together to find and share the stories, photos and videos that appealed to them—no editor required. So we poured our hearts and souls (and a lot of hours!) into building Mixx, opened the doors, held our breath, crossed our fingers… You get the idea. And here’s what happened:

You showed up and you kept showing up. You not only showed us that you loved Mixx, but you started helping and you turned out to be the most fantastic set of people we’ve known!

Right away, some of our newly minted Mixxers got together to create the MixxingBowl, a forum where they could discuss all things Mixx—including ideas to make a better Mixx. It wasn’t long before we were introduced to SocialBlend, a weekly podcast also devoted to Mixx and created by Mixxers. Now, we were blown away by both the MixxingBowl and SocialBlend not only because they were devoted to promoting us, but also because they made Mixxers a part of the product process. You told us what you liked, what you didn’t like and the services you wanted. That is how a community works together! Amazing—and a big part of the community spirit we wanted to inspire. But there’s more!

• We’ve seen hundreds of blog posts touting the virtues of Mixx—everything from the simple, clean design to how easy it was to set up and manage YourMixx, not to mention the fact that we work really hard to keep the community engaged and involved in what we’re doing.
• Honest_ape, one of the pithiest cats you’ll ever meet, created SocialMediacrity, an incredibly funny comic strip that updates every Tuesday and Thursday in the MixxingBowl.
• One of the Blenders, Greg Davies (our very own cGt2099), teamed up with Andrew Sorcini (MrBabyman) and they now co-host The Roundup, a weekly podcast about social media content on Mixx and Digg.

Those of you who have been here from the beginning know that our first priority has always been our community because if you’re not happy, we don’t have a very good product or a reason to exist, do we? But it’s always nice to know that the industry thinks we’re pretty cool, too:

• Publishers such as USATODAY, LATimes, CNN, NYTimes, Reuters, NPR, Slate, Weather.com, as well as thousands of blogs, have incorporated us into their pages.
• Great reviews have poured in from Techcrunch, Mashable, CNET, Webware, GigaOM, washingtonpost.com and many more.

A Growing Community
From our launch last October we’ve grown from 31,000 unique users to almost one million today! In May alone Mixx more than doubled in size!

Throughout this growth, users continue to personalize their “YourMixx” pages at an amazing rate; embrace user tags as a way to find and distribute relevant content; and engage in constructive dialogue in comments. We’re also incredibly happy to say that many of the veterans are continuing to reach out to the “noobs” to welcome them to the Mixx.

And this is just the beginning. There’s much more to come, a lot of which you’ll be seeing in the next three weeks or so.

As always, we truly value your insights, comments and suggestions. In fact, this is actually the theme of an upcoming contest—we’re going to challenge you to help us with a little update. We can’t say more right now, so be sure to check back soon—there are some seriously cool prizes at stake.

See you in the Mixx!
Mixxoxoxoxoxoxo

The Mixx Crew