Happy Birthday Mixxers!

My how time does fly! Because we’ve come so far in such a short period of time it’s hard to believe that Mixx launched to public beta one year ago today.

For this One Year post, we’d like to start off by thanking you all for helping us grow our community at such a staggering rate. You are the reason it’s so much fun for us to come to work each day.

So, in celebration of the Mixx community’s first birthday, we thought that we’d recap why we created Mixx in the first place, just how far we’ve come and how we continue to differentiate Mixx from our competitors. We’ll also touch on where we see the future of social media going and, of course, fill you in on a few new goodies coming your way!

The Mixx Mission
Mixx has a very simple mission: Connect users and publishers in relevant human circles.

The Internet has been a great leap forward in information sharing. In fact, one of the best things about the Internet is that it has destroyed the barriers to entry for publishing: you don’t need to own a printing press, a television station or other distribution system. In short, it has allowed everyone and his mother to publish. While this is totally cool, it has also lead to an absolute proliferation of information, so finding the content that’s relevant to you can be a serious pain in the @#$%. And for both both large and small publishers it’s equally difficult to find your audience.

But Mixx is solving this problem, and making sure that our and users and publishers are having fun in the process.

The Mixx Ingredients
A healthy dose of tags, real people, a dash of privacy, oodles of personalization and lot of empowerment make up our blend of the web.

The master Mixxologists here at HQ don’t believe in a “one size fits all” mentality. We know that there is no way for one page with limited real estate to accurately reflect the interests of each of its viewers. Sure, we all have common interests. However the great thing about humans is that we’re not actually clones—we can think for ourselves and, so, have divergent interests. Each and every Mixxer out there is unique and we’re not going to even try to stick you in one bucket. Instead, each Mixxer builds their own YourMixx page to reflect their interests.

The importance of the human element in Mixx can’t be understated. The best and most rewarding content experience comes when you find exactly what you are looking for. That generally happens when another human being, who shares your interests, recommends that content to you. Having humans rather than machines and special algorithms are recommending content—that’s where the sweet spot is. We know you’re smart enough to decide what subjects interest you, and it really isn’t that hard for you to figure out, now is it? That’s why we operate on a tag system and why we give you the ability to personalize your homepage based on these tags.

We also know that sometimes you might want to share in private or semi-private groups where you are in charge. That’s why Mixx allows you to set privacy controls and to share and see people and content that match. Currently, there are thousands of groups and communities throughout the Mixx system and they are absolutely thriving!

The Growth Story
Thanks in large part to the great–and growing—Mixx community, we’ve seen our number of visitors grow 500%. We now get more than 4 million unique visitors through our doors each month (fine print: rolling 30 days as of Oct 8, 2008). Sure, we get a little frustrated with the old standards out there, like Nielsen or Comscore, who don’t reflect what our Analytics and our servers are telling us. So, we figured it would be easier to just show you what we see everyday—the real numbers.  Here they are each month for the last five months:

Why We’re Growing
A lot of startups never reach the size that we have. We could blame luck, but we know the real reason for our growth is our fabulous, intelligent and wonderful Mixxers. It is you who have made this place great and who have spread the Mixx message and philosophy around the Internet. It is you who have created the community, the camaraderie, the infectiousness of Mixx and, ultimately, you are the ones who have shaped the product.

Speaking of that, we thought we’d pause and remind you that we’re always here waiting for feedback from our Mixxers. You can send a Mixx Mail to MixxID feedback, or use regular e-mail to send a note to feedback@mixx.com. Anything is welcome—questions, suggestions, and, yes, even the occasional curse. Forums more your chatting style? Then you can also check out the user forum located at mixxingbowl.com.  While a group of SuperMixxers runs this site, you’ll find that the staff at Mixx are over there mixxing it up as well.

The Mixx Difference
Birthdays and anniversaries are a time for reflection. So bear with us as we reflect on how Mixx is different from our competitors:

• Community: The best on the web… ‘nuff said.
• Tags: The world can’t be shoved into seven categories. It just can’t. By offering free-form tags, Mixx encourages you to create your own categorization of the world. And boy, have you—700,000 tags and counting!
• Personalization: YourMixx page, built around tags, allows you to personalize your media consumption experience to save you time and shortcut you to the information.
• Breaking News: In a world where news is traveling faster every day, you don’t want to be left out of the conversation. This is why Mixx allows SuperMixxers to spread the word faster with the Breaking News feature.
• Related Content: Social media is plagued by duplicate submissions and accusations of “stolen” submissions. At Mixx, we give everyone the chance to promote different viewpoints and minimize duplication with our Related Content feature. Again, allowing Mixxers to cut right to the information that matters most to them.
• Responsiveness: We go out of our way to be responsive to our Community. Why? Because every day, we are thankful that you are here. We know that you have lots of choices on the web and you chose us. It’s our responsibility to live up to that choice and make sure it’s one you want to make every day.

The Future of Social Media
Social media is the future of information sharing. In partnership with mainstream media sites, social media has the potential to revolutionize the way we get and share information and entertainment. The partnership of participatory journalism and civic journalism is the ultimate payoff for users. So while the exact evolution of social media is open-ended, it’s our belief that social media is on the verge of expanding outward past the early adopters and mavens to the mainstream users. Soon you won’t have to explain to your mom what Mixx is—she’ll be using it along with you. (So you’d better think about putting on an ironed shirt and clean up that potty mouth.) Even with this mainstream adoption, it will still be the early adopters who will set the pace and write the rules. That’s why we keep our ears to the ground so we can remain nimble and adaptable as the space continues to take shape.

And Now the Goodies!!
Gettin’ Widgety With It
That’s right, dear Mixxers, after months of deliberation, planning and execution, we’re proud to announce that we’re releasing the super duper flux capacitor, otherwise known as the Mixx widget. (OK, so it didn’t actaully take months. Jason and Bill worked their usual magic and produced this fine piece of engineering genius in no time flat.)

So what exactly does the widget do, you might ask?  Well, we’re so glad you asked! In just a few easy steps, you can create a widget for your site to pull in the most recent popular stories based on the tags or categories you’re interested in. We’re also giving you the flexibility to customize the widget. Want to make it 500 pixels wide? No problem. Want to change the color?  Piece of cake—choose from three standard themes or go a little crazy with the unstyled version. Want to only display the titles of the story? Yep, you can do that too. We’ve designed it with you in mind every step of the way which is how we’re able to give you this rock solid widget that will continuously provide the most up to date content based on what you’ve chosen to display.

So what are you waiting for? Go! Take it for a test drive and let us know what you think: Make Your Own

Toolbar
One of the side effects of the growth of Mixx is that other sites want to partner with us. So when searchme called, we answered! searchme is a seriously cool visual search site that let’s you see what you’re looking for. As you enter in a search term, categories appear that make it easy to narrow your search. Once you find  the area you’re looking for, an awesomely fantabulous visual browse interface opens up allowing you to look at pictures of the search results before committing to go visit the site.

We’re proud to announce that the Mixx searchme toolbar is now available for download. In this first version, the toolbar has a Mixx It button that allows you to submit any site to Mixx. It also has the latest headlines from Mixx built right into one of its stacks. Not sure what a stack is? Download the toolbar and find out–they are quite handy!

An Early Holiday Gift
We’re running a poll for our Mixxers to help us determine the Year Two Roadmap. Sure, we could pick out stuff all by ourselves, but where’s the fun in that?!?  Instead, we’re making a commitment to do the top three features as selected by Mixxers—just vote in the next 2 weeks! We’re work these in around the items we already have on the Roadmap so by the time 2009 arrives, we’ll have some great new stuff. Go vote now!

We’re excited about Mixx as we enter our 366th day! So get back in there in there and meet us in the Mixx!

Thanks, Thanks and Thanks!

The Mixx Team

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 9:06 am and is filed under Launch, 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.