Mixx is a user-driven social media web site that serves to help users submit or find content by peers based on interest and location. It combines social networking and bookmarking with web syndication, blogging and personalization tools.
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Users of Mixx can control a personalized blend of web content that includes text-based articles, images and videos. Mixx users can search and discover media relevant to their interests, and interact with friends and other Mixx users who share their common interests.
The content on Mixx comes from various online sources, such as news services and online publishers of media such as video, images, and various other content. Mixx users can submit items from any online source, including their own websites.
Mixx has received partnerships with a growing list of online publishing outlets including CNN.com, USA Today, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times and The Weather Channel.
Mixx lets users generate their own unique mix of web-based media by creating their own personalized start page. By submitting, commenting on and voting for or against stories, photos and videos that they like or don’t like using a democratic voting method, Mixx users can influence the flow of incoming media and recommend relevant media to other users within specific categories like business, sports and health using either free-form or pre-determined meta tags to define items by subject matter or geography.
Mixx users can also follow other users with whom they share common interests, as well as create, join and invite other Mixx users to private groups to further share and discuss relevant items among peers.
Mixx functionality is primarily divided into three categories:
1. Personalization capabilities
2. Search and discover capabilities
3. Sharing and networking capabilities
Mixx was started in 2007 by Recommended Reading, Inc. of McLean, Virginia. The private beta version of the site was launched on September 21, 2007,[1] and the public beta of Mixx was introduced on October 10, 2007.[2][3]
On October 8, 2007 Mixx announced the creation of content partnerships with USA Today, Reuters, The Weather Channel, Kaboose and uclick Comics.[4] On December 12, 2007 Mixx and The Los Angeles Times announced the creation of a content partnership in which the daily newspaper took a minor stake in Mixx.[5] On May 7, 2008 Mixx and CNN.com announced an alliance that added a "Mixx it" icon to the bottom of each CNN.com hosted story.[6][7] While readers can still share a story to other online social news sites like Digg or Facebook, those options are hidden under the "Share" option, making Mixx a prominent option.
Created and developed by a team of industry veterans with deep Internet, news publishing and online content expertise including several former executives from leading companies including Yahoo!, USA Today and AOL, the company is led by CEO and founder Chris McGill.[2]
The former head of strategy at USA TODAY, McGill previously served as the general manager of Yahoo! News where he oversaw the transformation of that site into the world’s largest online news outlet. McGill realized that people were becoming increasingly frustrated with surfing a myriad of web sites everyday to find the content that mattered to them. He determined in early 2007 that the time was ripe, and the tools available, to create a site that would make it easier for people with similar interests to discover the best the web has to offer—text, videos and photos. Thus, Mixx was born.
McGill quickly recruited top talent to form an executive team at Mixx that includes Kerry Pearce-Parkins, vice president of products and marketing, and formerly vice president of content at AOL; and Joe Dzikiewicz, Ph.D., Mixx's CTO, who most recently served as a lead engineer and product innovator at AOL where he spent ten years building cutting edge web applications and technologies.
The board of directors and advisors includes Burl Osborne, publisher emeritus of The Dallas Morning News, and former chairman at The Associated Press; and David Mandelbrot, well-known Internet entrepreneur and the former vice president of Yahoo!'s Content Acquisition Program as well as vice president of Yahoo!’s media and entertainment group where he managed Yahoo!'s Movies, Games, Finance, News, Sports, TV, Health and Yahooligans! properties.
In June 2007, Mixx received initial funding from Intersouth Partners of Durham, North Carolina.[8][9][10]
As of 15 April 2011, Mixx.com website announced that Mixx was recently acquired by UberMedia.
UberMedia is an independent developer of applications and web-based services for communication on Twitter and other social media platforms. UberMedia, initially called TweetUp, was founded in early 2010 by Internet entrepreneur, Bill Gross, in an effort to provide Twitter users with a way to find the world’s best Tweeters on topics of particular interest and at the same time enable Tweeters to increase their following among people keen to hear what they have to say.
Later that year, the company began to bring together under one roof many of the leading Twitter clients or apps in order to provide a platform for innovation in user experiences across the many platforms through which Twitter users send and read Tweets.
Some of the well-known applications, like UberSocial, Echofon, and Twidroyd have been created by UberMedia. Twitter applications for smartphones like BlackBerry, iPhone and Android have also been developed by UberMedia. Twidroyd and UberTwitter are the first apps on the market to deploy LivePreview™ where any embedded link – web pages, blog posts, images and video – are displayed alongside the Tweet.
It seems UberMedia already started on upgrading and improving Mixx. As of October 4, 2011, the Mixx Classic website has been shut down and now only displays a "we'll be back soon message" and a e-mail address collection form which subscribes you to a newsletter that will announce the relaunch of Mixx. As of October 8, 2011, this message still exists. All former Mixxers lost all their saved and indexed data despite being promised otherwise by the Mixx staff. All Mixx user profiles have been deleted. The profile pages return errors, do not even 301 redirect to home, and the site lost significant PageRank and potential rankings. As of December 6, 2011, Mixx domain redirects to Chime.in[11], and provides a similar experience that Mixx once did.