Mixx: Does it bring all the boys to the yard?

A new social news site, Mixx, aims to offer publishing companies a chance to get in on the social media space.  Mixx, just launched via an invitation-only beta and I happened to get a chance to give it a whirl.  The service at first seems like a Digg clone and even has a similar double consonant name. But there are a few distinct differences between the two social news sites.

1. In general, Mixx has a easy to use and very clean interface design.  Overall, I happen to like how I interact with the site more than I do with Digg.  The choice of their design and colors is very soothing and to be honest kinda makes me want to have a fruit smoothie at the moment.
   


2. Once you've login to Mixx, you'll be greeted with a personalized home page which is organizable via a drag and drop interface.  The home page allows you to select specific categories of interest, people, and/or custom tags. Each section you add shows the top user-submitted stories in each of those categories, in days, weeks, months, & years. If you'd prefer, you can still browse each of category/tag page individually.


3. One feature that some will find attractive, is that each major category has an individual RSS feed, of which you can subscribe to.


4. Mixx separates a submission into videos, pictures, and stories.  This is one feature I definitely think needs to be addressed by Digg and can see being a key reason why some people jump in and start utilizing the service.  When you select an image to show, it provides a nice little thumbnail for you to view, and it seems like they tried but failed to do the same thing with video.


5. My favorite feature and one that stands out for Mixx is their locality searches.  I can find news articles, photos, and videos relevant to my zip code and or city.


6. Each story has a commenting feature like Digg, however Mixx's comments tend to look more like YouTube video comments and tend to take up a lot of space in the design and are page's layout is of the design where you must scroll all the way to the bottom of the story before you can tell everyone what you thought about it.


7. Another nice feature that's missing from Digg is that Mixx provides the ability to create private groups, where inside your group people can submit and show the ratings of stories for those only inside that group.  You have to ability to post stories to the public or to the private group.


8. Mixx attempts to have a "friends" social element but doesn't quite live up to the recent Digg social functionality.  The layout kinda feels like Twitter or Pownce, but there's no messaging.  For good or bad, there is no shouts and the only thing you really can do is see their activity on the site.


9. UPDATE: One thing to note is to only use 1 category.  Using multiple categories restarts the numbering underneath that category.  You could have 2 votes under opinion and 13 under news, ect.  Unfortunately you can't stop someone from adding a category, thus diluting the count for the headline.  That is a major boo boo on the part of Mixx.
   

Do I think people will jump Digg for Mixx, probably not. 

However it does have enough potential to steal some of that user base.  I'm gonna keep my eyes out throughout the beta process and keep you updated on any major changes.

Tagged with: Digg, Mixx, Pownce, Twitter, YouTube