We may have mentioned once or twice how crazy we are about Twitter. Mixx is on Twitter. Everyone who works here is on Twitter. A lot of you have been on Twitter from the very beginning. So we know you’ll be happy! ecstatic! overjoyed! to find that any story, photo or video that you Mixx publicly can now be simultaneously Tweeted.

We know what you’re thinking: “OMG! NFW!” We had exactly the same reaction when a coworker dreamed this up. Another brilliantly simple feature that we didn’t know we wanted and now we can’t get enough of. Here’s how it works:

• Go to Your Account and enter your Twitter info under the Account Settings tab. Set the default to “on” if you want every item you submit Tweeted. Set it to “off” if you’d rather decide case-by-case.
• When you submit content, you’ll see a box on the submission page with the message “Also Twitter this submission for me.” If your default is set to “on” this is your chance to decide against the Tweet. No one will hold it against you!

Very cool, very simple. Now, who’s going to be the first to Tweet this post?

For the rest of you—there’s more! You know we can’t do an entire install with only one feature—no matter how fabulous. Well, we can, but anyway, there’s more.

Upgraded Mixx Notifications
Go to Your Account and you’ll find a new tab called “Notifications.” This is where you’ll be able to set preferences for the types of Mixx notifications you receive via email. It’s replacing the old “Receive an email when . . .” tab and will be split into categories:

Your Submissions: Decide what activity you’d like to be notified about regarding your OWN submissions. Choose any or all of the following:

• A Mixxer has voted on your submission
• Your submission has been marked as Breaking News (you’ll be able to see who marked it as breaking)
• Your submission has made it into the Popular category
• Your submission has been marked as related to another submission (you’ll see who marked it)

MixxFriends: Choose whether and when to be notified if:

• A Mixxer is Following you
• Someone you Follow or who Follows you Favorited something

You’ll also be able to allow your Followers to share content.

Comments: Decide if you’d like to be notified about comment activity whenever:

• Someone has commented on your submission
• Someone has replied directly to your comment
• Someone has commented on a submission you’re following

Groups: Get a notification when:

• Something has been submitted to a Group you belong to
• Someone joined a Group you belong to

Address Book Integration
We’ve also made it easier than ever for you to share the amazing stuff you find on Mixx! When you click “Email This” on any story, photo or video, we’ll let you pull addresses from your personal address book. Once you’ve shared, you’ll have the option to send a Mixx invite to any of your contacts who aren’t already in the Mixx. As soon as they accept the invite, you’ll automatically be set up as Friends and you can expect their note of thanks for telling them about the coolest place on the Internet!

API Update
You asked for it, and we heard you loud and clear. Thanks to your suggestions, we made JSON support our top priority for the Mixx API, and we’re proud to report that it’s ready for you. Even better, you can take advantage of it without changing the version of the API you’ve been using. Since adding JSON support doesn’t violate the interface contract, it’s right there in the current version (v1r1) that we all know and love.

Enough for one week? We’d give you a hint or two about what’s next, but we want you to check out these features first. So go forth and Tweet, email and notify! As ever, send your Feedback —we can’t wait to hear what you think!

Your Mixx Team

Hi everyone, Jason here with a quick note about something new we’re sending out on a trial basis. We’re calling it Mixx Picks—a somewhat-regular email newsletter featuring a handful of stories, photos and videos curated by the Mixx staff. Our goal is to pick out some of the cool, yet potentially overlooked, items that come across the site.

Now, we can already hear the cries—”What the #@%*! Mixx is spamming me!” Truth be told, we’re only sending Mixx Picks to users who have “Stay up to date with Mixx!” checked in their Account Settings. If you don’t wish to receive Mixx Picks, unsubscribing is as simple as going to your Account Settings and unchecking that box.

As mentioned above, this is something we’re testing out, and depending upon your feelings about it, we may or may not continue Mixx Picks. We think it’s pretty cool and we hope you do, too. Definitely let us know what you think. If you didn’t receive the premiere issue, you can view it online.

As you may have heard, later today, CNN will be launching “Mixx It” buttons on all of their stories. CNN is the gold standard of news, both online and broadcast, and we’re excited to have them recognize us as being a  growing presence in the social media space. CNN realizes that the Mixx community is a unique offering: a system that allows all content to be socialized into relevant human viewing circles through tags, personalization, and groups.

The amazing community we’ve been blessed with on Mixx has been showing the love to CNN from the beginning. We have over 1000 CNN stories, photos and videos submitted and more than 15% of them have been voted as a top story on the site.

Again, welcome to CNN, and a big thank you to our community! Look for our press release coming later today.

Some people think that if you drive your employees too hard that, well, it’s a bad thing. Obviously, they’re not thinking about engineers. A strange and magical breed, engineers prefer that we show our affection and appreciation by giving them more work. So we keep them busy and happy by implementing loads of improvements—many dreamed up by our product managers, many suggested by you. In fact, several Mixxers have even offered to help out with our coding.

So, we had a little meeting and asked ourselves, “What do we do with so many Mixxers offering up so much of their time to help us create a better experience—not to mention the many others who have great ideas for what to do with Mixx data?” Some people might think these users presumptuous, but for us, there was only one answer: open the borders.

That’s right—we’ve launched our API! Want to check it out? Just head down to the Kitchen and click on the new Blender link. If you’re already a Mixx user, this is the place to check out the cool applications and websites designed by your fellow Mixxers to be used in conjunction with Mixx. If you’re a developer, use the Blender to whip up and manage API keys and brag about your cool new Mixx app.

You know we like to stuff our releases with as many new features as possible, so we’re also launching… Recommended By.

We have a long and growing list of splentacularific® partner sites that have launched Mixx buttons to make it easier for you to Mixx their content. Starting today, we’re going to show you a bit more information from the readers of those sites, including the type of content they recommend. Go to a story from one of these partner sites and you’ll see a counter with the number of people who have recommended that story. Now, before you get your knickers in a twist—we know what you’re thinking and NO!, this number has absolutely NO bearing on a story’s popularity on Mixx. Even if 50,000 YouTubers think that a video of two cats in a marathon stare-down is Just the Cutest Thing Ever! and decide to recommend it, unless Mixxers agree, it won’t stroll to the top of the Popular list. The counter exists simply to let you know that 50,000 YouTube users think that particular bit of, er, creativity is worth your time. As ever, only Mixxers get to decide the true popularity of any piece of content.

YAURF!™ (Yet Another User Request Fulfilled!)
From the minute we launched, Mixxers have been requesting, demanding and politely begging for an RSS feed for YourMixx. Joe, who brought you MixxMash by working his special blend of wizardry, now offers a MixxMash RSS feed! Individually configured for each Mixxer, the feed can be activated by going to the Cook’s Corner in the Kitchen and clicking “Activate your MixxMash RSS feed.”

This should be enough you keep you busy for a couple of hours, but there’s much more on the way! Let us know what you think of the new features and keep sending us your comments and suggestions for improvements and new features you’d like to see.

Have we told you lately that we love you?

Your Mixx Team

mis•cel•la•ny
pronounced mis-uh-ley-nee
a miscellaneous collection or group of various or somewhat unrelated items.

Or, in Mixx terms, our mixxcellany release. First, and most importantly, a number of user requests (and props to their suggestors):

• Thanks to JNBammer, a “Career” category in Business
• Thanks to m4tt, a “Google” category in Tech (and in return, m4tt wrote a nice thank you note to us!)
• Thanks to NaturalWoman, a submit button on the Search Results page so you can submit directly from there after searching for duplicates.
• Thanks Pleeker, RobDiana, Calinazaret, Tunisian Guy and Yoda among others, improvements to the way Breaking News is presented. You can now see “Almost Breaking” news that one SuperMixxer has flagged as breaking. Making it easier for news to break, and giving credit to the SuperMixxers who are flagging breaking news.T
• Thanks Camille, a much better link to “Edit Your Mixx.”
• For CMcGill, we moved the “add everything” option on the “Add To YourMixx” widget to the bottom of the list.
• For MarkCarras, we moved the “Email This” link back to where it used to be on the story/photo/video pages.

And a couple of things we found:

• On your profile, under your “Voted for” tab, you now only see things you voted for that you didn’t submit.
• We cleaned up some problems with our story clustering feature related to groups.
• We also fixed a bug causing votes within groups to be counted incorrectly.

Finally, we introduce The Cook’s Corner. This can be found in the Kitchen section in the Mixx footer. In The Cook’s Corner, you’ll see some links (more coming) to some experimental stuff our engineers have cooked up in their spare time. Yes, even with all the above stuff going on, they still find time to play around. We are especially interested in what you think of some of the stuff there!

Think that covers it, but if you find other stuff we did, be sure to let us know!