Digg competitor Mixx just launched an extension to its groups feature that founder Chris McGill describes as “Ning for social media”.

Users can now set up Mixx community sites on their own subdomains (see ours here). Administrators have the power to brand them visually, post editorial content, and even make some revenue off advertisements. Others can join as members and begin submitting items as they would regularly on Mixx. All submissions (stories, images, and videos) can be made just to a particular community, or to the Mixx site as a whole as well.

This release is more akin to Reddit’s hosted “create a Reddit” service than it is to Reddit’s new open source offering since Mixx communities are hosted and can only be rebranded to a limited extent (with custom logos and color schemes).

Just as the standard Mixx experience is divided into verticals like Entertainment, Science and Sports, communities can deploy their own tabs for niche topics. The TechCrunch community, for example, has been seeded with tabs for “Obtaining Funding”, “Creating the Dream Team”, and “Revenue Models”. To keep each of these categories alive - and therefore your community members engaged - admins can set tags that will automatically import relevant items from the main Mixx sharing stream (”google”, “arrington”, “techcrunch”, “twitter”, “yahoo” have been set as tags in our case).

Communities also come equipped with a message board and a “member lounge” that provides community overview information such as activity stats, member lists, and awards for top submitters.

Social media fanatics will enjoy this new ability to carve out their own alcoves in Mixx. I’d really like to see Mixx take the next step and allow for a completely rebranded experience so that web publishers the net over can incorporate user contributed content seamlessly into their sites. This would entail proper domain masking and thorough CSS and HTML customization, as you’d find on KickApps. Then Mixx could really claim to compete with the likes of Ning and the other social networking platforms.

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May was a good month for social-news site Mixx. At the beginning of the month, CNN.com put “Mixx it” buttons at the end of every article on its site. Consequently, the number of unique visitors to Mixx more than doubled from 380,000 in April to 904,000 in May.

To put that into perspective, only 2.4 million people have ever visited Mixx since it launched in September, 2007. In other words, more than a third of all the people who have ever gone to Mixx, went there last month.

Those numbers come from Mixx itself, which sent us a screen shot from its Google Analytics page (click on it above to see a larger image). That hockey stick you see at the end is the CNN effect. Third-party measurement services such as Compete, ComScore, and Quantcast only go through April right now, and are widely divergent on the numbers they do report for the site (168,000, 65,000, and 53,000 U.S. uniques, respectively). But they all do show a similar trend of flattish growth most of this year through April. When they include May numbers, we’ll see if they register the CNN spike as well.

Mixx still has a long way to go to catch up with competitor Digg, which had 6 million U.S. visitors in April, and 13.8 million worldwide, according to comScore. (Digg self-reports 26 million users).

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Digg competitor Mixx landed another big distribution deal. CNN.com will be adding a “Mixx It” button after every article on the site. This will be right next to the “e-mail” and “share” buttons. Last March, the Mixx bookmark button was adopted by the New York Times, but only as one of many options. Similarly, when CNN.com readers click on the “share” button, they have the option to send the story to Digg, Facebook, del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. But Mixx will be highlighted as a separate button, apart from the regular share options.

The deal with CNN could give a huge boost to Mixx’s small-but-growing membership base of 500,000 registered users (and between 70,000 and 180,000 monthly unique visitors, depending on which measurement service you look at). CNN.com has 22 million monthly uniques in the U.S., according to comScore (and 30 million worldwide). CNN.com readers who decide to Mixx their stories will be able to bypass Mixx’s registration process when they get taken to the site so that they can browse immediately. They will still have to register, however, to save a story or set up a personal Mixx page.

For CNN, the appeal of Mixx might have something to do with the fact that Mixx really lets readers get extremely granular in their interests. Categories are based on tags, with already 300,000 different tags on Mixx. So if you are interested in Alzheimer’s, for instance, you can add that tag to your personalized Mixx page or search for stories explicitly categorized with that tag. On Digg and other social news sites, you can search for stories about Alzheimer’s also, but there is no Alzheimer’s category. Notes Mixx CEO Chris McGill:

When you are looking at Yahoo Buzz or Redditt or Digg, they are really playing a one-size fits all game. All the stories are just shooting for the popular board.

Mixx, he thinks, can do a better job to help you find and share stories around your particular interests, no matter how obscure they may be. Of course, to gain all the benefits of such a system, you have to be willing to do a little more work in setting up your preferences. And, ultimately, the quality of the stories you find on Mixx will depend on the quality (and number) of submissions. With 13.3 million monthly visitors adding and voting stories on Digg, that is going to be a very difficult network effect to overcome. But if Mixx can convince enough CNN readers to join its bookmarking club, it could survive become a solid Digg alternative, or at least survive long enough to get bought.

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Mixx, a Digg-like site that ranks news stories based on reader voting, will launch a new “breaking news” feature later today that should get real news onto the home page very, very fast. More on that below.

Since launching just last September, Mixx has been on a tear to release new products. Groups came in December, followed by private mail in Februrary. Also in February they released a clustering feature that I think would fix a big problem at Digg - duplicate stories describing the same event. With the new feature, other users could add different but related stories to the main news item. This removes the need for Duelling stories and it gives the reader more content on the stuff they just clicked on.

So today they’re releasing yet another new feature. Like the others, it’s worth a little thought. The goal is to get the really hot news up to the home page very quickly and without having to go through the normal vote gathering process, which can take up to 24 hours before a story makes it to the home page. To get this special treatment, A special user, called a Super Mixxer (here’s how you become a Super Mixxer), must tag a story as Breaking. Once a story has been tagged by two Super Mixxers, the story goes to the home page under the Breaking News area. The story will continue to build up votes and move into the general Popular area of the page at that time. Others may drop off entirely.

For now only text stories can be Breaking, although they will add more story types over time.

This is different from how Digg handles things. Nothing gets special treatment until its gone through the normal voting procedure. Once it’s a top page story, though, if it continues to do well it can move over to the Top story in whatever topic is being viewed. So Mixx is getting the best news to the home page very, very quickly. Whereas Digg likes to make it tough to get on the home page at all, but then find ways for the really good stuff to stay there even longer.

I think the Mixx feature is a great way to make sure that breaking news gets to the home page extremely fast, possibly hours before it goes popular on Digg The key pressure points are whether the Super Mixxers are in fact all that Super. And if they are willing to take the time to constantly scan incoming news for relevant stuff. Another thing to think about - if this model works and traffic grows substantially at the site, look out for the guys that will want to pay the Super Mixxers to vote for their stuff.

It is just one more feature that I like and that Digg doesn’t have or show much inclination to build. At some point Mixx is going to have their very onw big audience for social voted news, second only to Digg in reach.

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The New York Times tonight added Mixx bookmarking buttons on its site, which is an important milestone for the company. Facebook, Digg and Yahoo Buzz are the only other third party social bookmarking services that are offered.

The NYTimes doesn’t include well known and more established services like Delicious, Reddit and others on its pages (Delicious was bumped for Mixx). And since Mixx is only six months old, so this is an important sign of confidence in the young startup.

An example is here, just click on the “share” button to the right of the article.

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Social voting outfit Mixx has taken $2 million Series A1 in a round led by existing investor InterSouth Partners.

Mixx offers a category based social voting service that competes with sites such as Digg, Reddit and Propeller. McLean, Virginia based Mixx was launched in September 2007 with talent including former executives from Yahoo!, AOL, USA TODAY and The Associated Press. The company has regularly launched new features in an attempt to stand out in a market place with strongly entrenched loyalties to existing players.

Mixx added the LA Times to its investor group in December. Total funding to date is $3.5 million.

(via VentureBeat)

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Digg competitor Mixx continues to impress us with new features (although the exodus of Digg users to them may have been short lived).

A new feature launches this week on Mixx called Related Items. It solves a common problem found on Digg and other sites where multiple articles on the same story compete with each other to get to the home page. One person may submit a story from USAToday. Another may submit basically the same story but from the Washington Post. Those stories are tracked separately on Digg, and votes are split between them as users discover them. The result is that the story takes longer to get to the home page than it otherwise should. Or worse, both make it and the story is duplicated. Digg catches duplicate submission for the exact same link, but they are unable to determine if stores are related.

The Related Items feature on Mixx flags a submission when it thinks that a story is similar. A message appears that says “We may already have this story! Or at least one startling similar. Take a look at the stories below.” The user submitting the related story can then choose to submit it anyway, or add it as a related item to the previous submission. Digg also flags stories that may be similar to other submissions, but does not offer the ability to cluster the new story to the old ones.

There is a benefit to the submitter in adding the story to the previous submission because the new story will be added, too (and traffic will flow). Users benefit because they get more information and perspectives on the story. Here’s a screen shot of how the clustering will look (click for bigger view):

The clustering that will occur from this will very much resemble TechMeme, which is a great way to quickly find multiple perspectives on the news.

Mixx, which is backed by Intersouth Partners and the LA Times, is still a tiny blip compared to competitors like Digg and Reddit. Comscore says Digg has 12 million unique monthly visitors, compared to about a million on Reddit. Mixx? They’ve got just 45,000. That’s probably a low count, since newer and smaller sites are much harder for Comscore to measure. but they have a long, long way to go before they are even no. 2 in this market. The company was founded by Chris McGill.

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Why is it so hard to contact people on some social media sites? On Digg, for instance, you can send members a “Shout” that typically appears as a public comment on their profile page, but you cannot send a private message. Mixx, a Digg clone that we like, is adding private mail and group message boards to its site tomorrow. Members will be able to send mail to any other member, and block messages from any member as well. Every group will also have a message board to discuss a general topic not related to any one story. These are pretty basic features that somehow got lost as lean-and-mean social media sites started to take off. The only other social news site that has mail is Propeller, which is owned by AOL.

Are social news sites better off keeping everything above board and public, or do private messages foster a deeper sense of community by strengthening individual links between members?

One reason not to allow private messaging is that it could be used to game the system. The most active members might constantly be getting private messages encouraging them to vote up particular stories. Sites like Mixx and Digg are all about collective action, and they should be careful not to dilute that emphasis. But sometimes you just need to contact someone, and there should be an easy way to do that too.

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According to a company blog post, social news site Reddit has launched, in closed beta, the ability for users to create their own “reddits”.

The new feature will eventually allow all users to create their own social news lists for chosen topics. These customized reddits will come in three flavors: public, restricted, and private. If you set up a public reddit, every Reddit user will be able to view and participate in the reddit. Restricted reddits will only allow certain members to contribute. And private reddits will only be viewable by their own members.

For the next week or so, Reddit will solicit a “handful of users” to try out the new feature before opening it up to everyone. Mixx has implemented something similar, while we’re still waiting for Digg to do the same. As these social news sites become more platform-like, we’ll see them competing with offerings like Fraxi (covered here) and Pligg.

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In late November I wrote that Digg is still the best online social news voting site online, but upstart Mixx is trying very hard to change this.

Mixx has added groups to their social voting service. The new feature allows for the creation of public groups based on topic area, allowing for free and open categorization of news. For example Mixx users could start a Ron Paul group that only tracks stories about Ron Paul, and Ron Paul fans would then be able to visit this page on Mixx for those links. Digg offers some functionality in this area with friend lists that allows you to track what your friends Digg, but with Mixx, groups are front and center, with popular groups featured on the front page and a link to an index of other groups easily accessible.

“Mixxers” are able to carry on a conversation on the “Soapbox” within each group which is outside of the standard comment areas. Each public group comes with a leader board with daily awards for both the Top Submitter and the “Thought Leader” in that group. And naturally there’s social networking features as well. According to Mixx:

Want to cozy up with other group members (and no, we don’t mean in an “I’m looking for a date” kind of way)? Just browse other Mixxers’ profiles using their avatars.

Group administrators can set a welcome message and create rules for that particular group, and retain control over just how public the group is; Mixx groups can be public or private.

Some groups already functioning on Mixx include Web 2.0 and beyond the terror dome, Best of Flickr, and Cats.

Mixx still has a long way to go in terms of traffic to catch up with Digg, but an impeccable management team, an investment from the LA Times, and innovative features such as what has been announced today certainly help make them a serious competitor in the long term. I’m still a big Digg fan and no doubt many readers will be, but imagine Digg if you could set your own categories. Ubuntu fans would have their own page, although unfortunately the smallest feature or mockup would still make the front page. With a feature like this Digg could even have a page with stories just about Digg, and as we know they are always popular

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