Hello, awesome Mixx Community!

You may have noticed that we’ve been a little quiet lately. Besides our release of Mixx Communities, we haven’t given you too many goodies in quite some time. We’re changing that.

Right now, our engineers are hard at work doing some re-factoring of Mixx’s code in our never-ending quest of making Mixx faster, more stable and more reliable. Although Joe (aka DonutEyeJoe), Jason, Bill, Raghu and Mike love Babies (& Lemons), they don’t like to see many of them around Mixx! We’ll hopefully be putting the finishing touches on this phase of work in the next couple of weeks.

After that, we’re moving on to other items, as usual, requested by our Mixxers!

Holy Spam, Batman!
Things like blogspam, blind voting and other sketchy behavior can be annoying. We’ve got some creative ideas to continue getting the cream of the crop to float to the top. In the meantime, if you see something dicey, hit that “Report This” button—KoriHill loves nuking bad guys. SuperMixxers can now send in unlimited reports, so start hunting.

Communities For All
Mixxers have taken to Communities like a pig to, well, you get the idea. With that have come some great suggestions for improvements that we’ll be taking to heart and pushing out. We’re also making it easier for you to find the best Communities out there.

But I Have a Name!
Annoyed when “CNNReader” or “YouTubeViewer” beats you to the punch submitting that awesome content from our partners? Well, soon we will let you claim that anonymous submission if you are the first Mixxer to find it. You’ll get a small slice o’ karma and the ability to edit the tags, categories and locations.

We’re Serious, Really
Long promised, but soon to be delivered, we’re really going to launch nested comments. We promise. We even have a cool layout from our designer, Alex! We’re just waiting for Doug to get back from Thailand to get started.

Not Like Everyone Else
Finally, we’ve got some killer ideas to further differentiate ourselves from the rest of the crowd. No, we’re not going to tell them to you just yet. Well, if you come up with a new pair of pants for Will, then maybe we’ll give you some hints.

As always, we welcome feedback and would love to hear from you. Together, we’re building a great Community and want to continue that partnership!

~The Mixx Team

It’s not like we’re ready for a walker yet, but we have to admit that parts of Mixx are starting to show their age. Well, OK, one part: the Mixx Tour was cobbled together just before we launched and because we’ve had a few changes and added a lot of new features, the Tour needs an overhaul. Or, to put it plainly, with more than 2 million people visiting Mixx each month, it needs to be tossed out and replaced. We put this little project on the pile for several Mixx Team members but got the hairy eyeball from one too many of them—something about being busy building other cool features for you. So that’s where you come in, dear Mixxers!

We want you to create the new Mixx Tour for us! After all, who knows the site better than you? All you have to do is create a video tour that highlights Mixx features and tools—the idea is to make it easy for a newbie to get acquainted with the site and be able to feel at home right away. Share how you Mixx, how you found the Groups and Communities that mattered most to you (Note: you don’t have to share which Groups and Communities if you’d rather not!); suggest places to look for help (Feedback, The Mixxing Bowl, etc.). And please, be sure to explain what social media is all about—many new users really aren’t sure.

Other things that must be included in the Tour (even if they’re just being pointed out):

• YourMixx: Customization!
• Categories
• Tags: How to use them
• Groups: Public and private
• Communities
• Site Mail

You’ll have three weeks to come up with your perfect version of the Mixx Tour and then the entire Mixx Community will get a chance to vote for their favorite. The top five will go to Chris who will then choose the winning Tours. Before you ask: Yes, you can submit more than one Tour; no you may not vote more than once.

Now this is a contest so there are some ground rules:

• Tours may not be longer than four minutes, with an ideal running time of two to three minutes.
• You cannot break any of the Mixx Terms of Use
• Entries must be submitted to the Mixx Group Mixx Tour Contest
• No entries will be accepted after Friday, August 1st, 2008
• Keep all source files of your video
• Anything submitted becomes property of Mixx

Oh, and did we mention that there are prizes? It is a contest, after all!

• 1st Prize: Apple 3G iPhone, a badge on your profile and the possibility of your Tour being featured on Mixx*
• 2nd Prize: A Flip Mino camera
• 3rd Prize: An American Express Gift Card for $100

As an added bonus, everyone who submits a Tour will get some free Mixx schwag!

We hope this is enough to get you started; be sure to take a look at the current Mixx Tour and then let us know if you have any questions! Now get to work—we need to get this off of the To Do list!

Your Mixx Team

* Mixx will retain ultimate editorial control over placement and promotion of its tour.

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