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September 20, 2007

Stealthy Startup Mixx Launches Into Private Beta

Michael Arrington

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Mixx is a startup we’ve been watching for the last few weeks. They’ve been extremely quiet about their service until very recently. And since they are located well outside of Silicon Valley, in Virginia, they’ve been able to stay below the radar despite their high profile founder: Chris McGill, formerly the General Manager of Yahoo News and more recently the VP Strategy at USA Today.

McGill’s experience with new media news at Yahoo and old media at USA Today may serve his new startup, which launches into private beta this evening, well. Mixx is a new social news site. To put it into context, it’s a sort of cross between Digg, LinkedIn and MyYahoo. In a nutshell, its a social network that lets you find and share news based on your interests and location.

One aspect of the service - each user has a customized Digg-like experience, effectively creating smaller niche versions of the popular social news site. That means niche publishers get to play, too. Today they are largely shut out of Digg. But popular stories from more obscure topics can get traffic traction through Mixx. Stories, video and photos can all be bookmarked.

And Mixx hopes to partner with those publishing partners to provide easy bookmarking links back to Mixx. That will drive traffic back and forth, with both sides theoretically winning.

Each user gets a customized home page with news items that Mixx thinks you’ll find relevant. There are also links to overall popular stories, as well as categorized stuff like business, sports and health. Users can also create and join topical based groups, which allow them to further refine the news they submit and receive.

Will Mixx win? I think it’s a worthy experiment. Entrepreneurs have been trying to crack the personalized news nut for years, with a string of failures. At some point someone will get the model right. New sites like Thoof are trying their own independent experiments, too. Other services that we’ve covered that have entered this space in one way or another include Searchfox (deadpool, assets acquired by Yahoo), Findory (deadpool), Spotback (change in strategy) and Feeds 2.0.

Mixx launches tonight into private beta. Sign up on their home page to participate - they’ll be letting in users over the next few weeks in preparation for a full launch.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Colin Dowling

    September 20th, 2007 at 7:36 pm

    Too complicated for mass adoption, in my opinion

  2. Ed

    September 20th, 2007 at 7:44 pm

    The masses don’t have to get so involved, this is tailored for closed groups mostly, people in your local area, very similar interests, mostly friends. I have already applied a while back!

  3. 22 Ways to Attract Success !

    September 20th, 2007 at 7:45 pm

    i agree too complicated !

  4. Ritu Pant

    September 20th, 2007 at 7:54 pm

    Will see how it goes when they go on public beta, as for now I am headed to their site for invitation. Thanx for the info

  5. Colin Dowling

    September 20th, 2007 at 8:16 pm

    Yes, I agree that small and niche could get traction, but the key to big money is either a few enterprise customers paying big bucks or tons of independent users. I just don’t see it here. Having great founders may mean you have a roadmap to success, but it doesn’t drive the car.

  6. RBA

    September 20th, 2007 at 8:24 pm

    The mainstream cares little for news items that XYZ thinks they’ll find relevant. More on that later.

  7. Wes

    September 20th, 2007 at 8:45 pm

    I think I will give it a try as long it does not take a lot of time from me.

  8. Steve

    September 20th, 2007 at 9:01 pm

    “It’s a social network that allows you to _________.” Sheesh.

    [rubs hands together feverishly, drooling in anticipation of an actual new idea]

  9. RBA

    September 20th, 2007 at 9:14 pm

    Sorry for the double post. As I said, I think the mainstream cares little for news items that XYZ thinks they’ll find relevant, where XYZ is an algorithm. Change XYZ for “an entity” then they care (that’s why some people read a newspaper and others read a different one).

    I think the “regular” consumer still follows the old media standards. That is, to get the news they enjoy from both, general outlets with whom they may share some mindset (in the “real world” that would be the Times, The Merc, LA Times, etc), and topic-specific sites (PC World, Cosmopolitan, Forbes…).

    Why is that? I think that’s because the “regular” consumer doesn’t face the same amount of information overload that we, the digerati, the early adopters suffer day after day. So although the regular consumer is definitely confronting a lot more information than they were before the Internet became a medium to get “the news”, they aren’t dealing with 200 RSS feeds, so their needs to filter out news aren’t as strong as ours. And that might be why Digg is popular (their audience is mainly techies and just because they follow Digg, they suffer information overload by default :-), but a Digg about cats is not yet a hot ticket.

    This has nothing to do with what I think of Mixx BTW. I do like their approach, except perhaps for the “will get what Mixx thinks I’ll find relevant”, but that’s a personal preference. I just don’t like it when a machine tries to “thinks” for me.

  10. Brenda

    September 20th, 2007 at 9:27 pm

    Interesting, but may be too complicated as others have said. However, maybe we’ll all just get used to it?

  11. edith

    September 20th, 2007 at 9:38 pm

    i am in the closed beta and its not complicated at all. Its as easy to setup as my Yahoo, which last i looked was being used by 20MM/month. I don’t think complicated is their hurdle, distribution is. How are they going to get their submit buttons all over the web like digg has? That is what their founder should concentrate on.

  12. SteveBallmer

    September 20th, 2007 at 10:07 pm

    The MS Cloud apps are on the way, but this is close to our app “Blend”. I would perfer that you people wait for the real thing, but this will do in a pinch.
    http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

  13. Online Calculator

    September 21st, 2007 at 4:47 am

    Yeah i agree it seems very complicated

  14. Dan

    September 21st, 2007 at 6:22 am

    From a local perspective, I can see this succeeding where companies like Backfence failed. Creating a community or social network of like-minded people to share news stories, restaurant and music reviews, local events, etc. could work and might be a good way for major media to get into the hyperlocal game.

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