Back in July

As we noted previously, once you log-in with your Twitter credentials via OAuth, the service scans the tweets of the people you follow for links. Rather than trying to make you decipher a long URL or worse, a short URL, to know what the content is, TweetMixx pulls out the title, to let you know what you’re going to click on in plain English (or whatever language the link is in). You can also easily retweet any item or see that link’s details on Mixx.com in this main TweetMixx stream.

On top of showing off the links from your friends, you can also view all the tweets (including those without links), just as you would on Twitter.com. And you can update your status from TweetMixx. As a straight-up Twitter client, it’s not a bad one, as it’s fast, and the plain-English link idea is a pretty nice one. There’s also an area to basically saved filtered searches for links you may be particularly interested in. Saved filtered searches are nothing new for Twitter clients, but the link angle is again, a nice one.

The problem will be getting people to use TweetMixx rather than the current favorite TweetMeme for Twitter link discovery. I think much of what TweetMixx offers is actually more compelling than TweetMeme (the personalized links on top of the popular links section), but TweetMeme controls the all-important retweet button right now across the web, and as such has the mindshare for links on Twitter.

And then there’s the wildcard that is gearing up to enter the race: Bit.ly. As the default URL shortener for Twitter, Bit.ly already has a ton of interesting link data that it will apparently soon use for some kind of link discovery site of its own.

Still, TweetMixx is definitely worth taking for a spin if you’re particularly interested in links your friends are sharing, or those for particular queries. And the fact that it can be used as a pretty nice looking Twitter client on top of a link aggregator is a bonus.

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News aggregator site and Digg-competitor Mixx had a rough June. Traffic to the site took a 68 percent nosedive in the U.S. from May to June, according to comScore (see chart). Compete shows a similar trend.

Wondering if Mixx had maybe been paying for traffic and had now stopped, I asked CEO Chris McGill if this was the case. Absolutely not. He replied: “We have never paid for traffic… Not once. How could we? … We have operated for two years on almost no money.” Hard to argue with that. Mixx has only raised $3.5 million to Digg’s $40 million, and is “nine guys sitting in a boiler room.”

So what happened? McGill admits, “We had some performance problems in the month of June.” A database problem and a DNS change ended up temporarily blocking Google. Traffic was only down 30 percent, says McGill, and has almost fully recovered in June. He sent me a screen grab from Google Analytics (below) showing that in the first half of July, unique visitors tripled to 1.5 million compared to the first half of June. For the full month of June, he sent me a Google Analytics page showing 1.8 million total visitors. (comScore’s estimate for U.S.-only unique visitors in June was 337,000, but it typically under-reports traffic for small sites).

If Mixx’s drop was just a technical issue (and I have no reason to doubt McGill’s explanation, he was very upfront with me), then comScore and Compete should pick up the site’s rebound in their July numbers. I hope that’s the case because Digg needs competition. For instance, in April, Mixx started experimenting with showing ads based on user voting, a great idea which Digg then started taking seriously in June. And just yesterday, it launched TweetMixx to tap into hot links appearing on Twitter.

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TweetMixx works by skimming through tweets and looking for links. The more times a given link appears on Twitter, the higher placement it gets on TweetMixx. Likewise, you can log-in using your Twitter credentials and receive a personalized hotlist of tweets based only on the Twitter users you follow.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the idea isn’t a novel one. TweetMixx is facing off with plenty of competition — Tweetmeme has become quite popular, and sites like twitrollr and tweetlinx do very similar things (and we just saw TuneIn launch this month at our RealTime CrunchUp).

But CEO Chris McGill says that there are a few differences that help set TweetMixx apart. For one, the site will figure out the name of the article being linked to, so rather than seeing something like http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/24/adwords-gets-more-local/, you’d see the article’s title, “AdWords Gets More Local”. One other feature offered by TweetMixx is a much-improved version of Twitter Search. Using the standard engine offered by Twitter, you can only search through the text of tweets, but not the articles they’re linking to — if someone fails to explain what a link is in their tweet, then it won’t show up in results. Using TweetMixx, you can search through both standard tweet text and the names of the articles that are being linked to, which can turn up many more relevant results.

Mixx’s decision to launch TweetMixx is yet another display of how powerful Twitter can be when it comes to surfacing new content, as it’s often much faster than a Digg-like voting system. The biggest clash is yet to come, though: pretty soon bit.ly, the very popular URL shortener, is going to be launching its own Digg competitor, which is going to have a huge volume of metadata to draw from.

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Mixx, a Digg-like site that lets users vote to push news stories and other bookmarked content to the home page, is experimenting with an innovative new advertising platform called Mixx Sifter. Frankly, and we’ve written this before with other Mixx features, this is something Digg should have done.

The idea is to get the Mixx community to give direct feedback on advertising. The better ads will get impressions – not based on how much is paid, but simply on how positive the feedback is from users. Last year we’d heard that Digg was thinking of doing something along these lines. Digg founder Kevin Rose refused to speculate on it, though, in a recent interview.

Here’s how Mixx Sifter works – an advertiser uploads five different ads, in virtually any format. Mixx then invites its power users (elite Mixx users who have spent hundreds of hours on the site) to review those ads, rate them and provide direct private feedback. The users get karma points and a chance to win a gift certificate or computer in return. The most popular ad unit is then run on the site.

The product is launching with advertiser LivingSocial, and Mixx CEO Chris McGill says Clorox is next up. Advertisers will pay up to $8,000 for the user review and ad run. For now ads are rotating weekly, but eventually this will be a daily product, says McGill, with a new advertiser every day.

Mixx is highlighting the value of the direct feedback to advertisers, which is certainly a selling point. But what interests me is the use of the community to drive good advertising forward. Google has long taken into account click through rates on text ads in determining placement (and profit maximization), but there are other ways to do this as well. Mixx is now trying one way. It will be fascinating to see if and how Digg responds.

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Last time we wrote about Mixx, they were touting healthy traffic numbers and boasting the fact that Hitwise report suggested that its users are more mainstream than those of their main competitor Digg. Today, the company says its visitor numbers have increased to about 7 million per month (citing January figures), which is up from 5.8 million in October 2008.

Meanwhile, all the big social news and discovery services are showing healthy growth, and Mixx appears to still play in the minor leagues. Take a look at this snapshot from Compete, for example, which show Digg is thriving and Reddit is steadily outpacing Mixx. Google Trends paints a slightly different picture but still pegs Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon to be more popular than Mixx. Quantcast, finally, says Mixx receives about a 1/5 of the amount of visitors Digg does.

For the sake of comparison: Mixx raised $3.5 million in funding so far, while Digg pocketed $40 million to date.

Mixx is launching a new website today to better serve their existing users, which they claim have provided all the feedback that was used to put together the revamped web presence.

We’ll let you be the judge (more info here):

Old Mixx

New Mixx

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A screenshot from their Google Analytics account shows that the Digg-competitor is gaining traction, receiving over 5.8 million unique visitors last month. Compete (as usual) estimates lower numbers but shows a similar growth pattern, as does Google Trends. Quantcast seems to affirm the number of reported visitors as well.

So how does that compare to Digg?

While we don’t have any insight on their internal stats, we do know Comscore, Compete, Quantcast and Google Trends all show that Digg yields much more traffic than Mixx, even if growth appears to be stagnating while Mixx’s is soaring.

Mixx is also very eager to show that their user base is more diverse than Digg’s audience, citing a Hitwise report that suggests its users tend to be more female (49% vs. 33%), older (36% in the 18-24 age group vs. 45%) and wealthier (e.g. 19% makes more than $150k per year vs. 4%) than Digg users. But comScore’s U.S. demographics of both sites tells a different story. According to comScore, females make up 47% of the Mixx audience vs. 46.4% for Digg. So about the same. But when it comes to 18-24-year-olds comScore thinks Mixx skews younger, with 17% vs. only 14% for Digg. And for households earning more than $100,000, Digg wins there as well with 30% vs. 27% for Mixx.

So whose numbers are you going to believe? It’s important to note that the Hitwise report was based on a 4-week study, which is in my opinion far from enough data to jump to any conclusions about the difference in user demographics. When you take the comScore data into account, the demographic differences seem pretty minor. Certainly they are not big enough to make any solid statements about Mixx being more mainstream than Digg.

Still a nice traffic growth pattern for a website that’s only been live for about a year and raised only $3.5 million in funding so far (Digg, for reference, has raised $40 million to date). Below are some comScore charts for the U.S.

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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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Virginia based Mixx launched into private beta in September and has been gaining positive reviews, with Michael Arrington noting recently that the site had been gaining “refugees” from Digg.

The company has a strong pedigree with founder Chris McGill having previously been the General Manager of Yahoo News and more recently the VP Strategy at USA Today. The site describes itself as taking the best features of Digg, LinkedIn and My Yahoo.

As part of the investment Latimes.com readers will “have direct access to Mixx’s networking and personalization tools through integrated functionality on story pages” and LATimes stories will be available through Mixx search results.

The amount of the investment was not disclosed.

(via Venture Beat)

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Numbers

Numbers should never be the final arbiter of what is good. Windows is still the most widely used operating system world wide but many would argue it is far from the best; however numbers help, and as comScore demonstrates Digg is still the most popular social networking site when compared to three competitors: Reddit, Propeller and Mixx.

It’s hard to make out Propeller on this chart, but with a microscope they are a small blue dot just below the October (green) line for Reddit. Despite some of my previously harsh observations on the service they are doing remarkably well under their new banner; if Reddit sold for a rumored $12m in October 2006, Propeller must be worth around $30-50 million now based on the traffic alone. Mixx is soo small it doesn’t register on comScore’s metrics.

More people use Digg, but does it make them the best service?

Content

Content is something that benefits from a bigger user base, and again Digg has the advantage here. When Propeller launched (originally the old new Netscape) then head Jason Calacanis promised a better version of Digg because the results and top stories would have the guidance of paid guides. It works as much as it provides a broader picture of news stories, but it fails in the same way that any non-democratic decision making process does: it doesn’t always have the support of many. It’s not unusual to see stories on the top of sub-sections (say Tech) on Propeller that had a handful votes despite the site having a reasonable user base that usually sustains stories on mid-range 2 figure sums. If it has two votes, should it be on top? It wouldn’t be on Digg.

Reddit has the problem that despite it providing perhaps the biggest difference in terms of the content and links provided, it appears to be beholden to the political campaigns of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. I find some interest in both campaigns given their interesting and often inspiring use of the internet as a campaigning tool, but I’d figure that I’m probably in the minority on that one.

Mixx is getting there. Since Michael’s post the number of people voting on the site has definitely increased and even former Netscape head Jason Calacanis is now participating (a Mahalo link was the top story as I wrote this post).

Usability/ Looks

Appearance is subjective and no two people usually agree on any given site, but there’s just something about Digg. Whether it’s the nice big headlines, the easily accessible voting box and bury buttons, the colors and layout that just work; it could be that it’s a case of familiarity but I just don’t see the same on the other three sites.

Reddit is functional and simplistic, which works for them, but it isn’t pretty to look at, and it’s probably not the best first impression for new users either.

Propeller tries to sit somewhere between Digg and a functional news sites, and it doesn’t do a bad job, but I’ve never felt as comfortable with it. Headlines are smaller and visually it doesn’t feel quite as accessible as Digg; but having said that this is a subjective view only, and others may well disagree. Mixx is remarkably similar to Propeller, soo much so (once you get to the sub pages) that I’d suggest that Mixx isn’t a Digg clone, it’s a Propeller clone.

Overall

One often heard criticism of Digg is that the headlines can only be understood by “insiders,” those that know tech. It’s occasionally a valid criticism but over all Digg’s biggest strength is its depth and variety of content. The politics pages don’t require an in-depth understanding of the latest screen manager for Linux, nor do many of the sub-categories. Redditt is Digg’s closest competitor appeal wise, but it doesn’t have the depth and variety of news headlines. Propeller and Mixx will have the greatest appeal to a new, non-geek/ non-first adopter audience, but that very same audience may not be quiet as embracing of social voting itself. It’s the right demographic to appeal to because it’s an untargeted audience, but Digg continues to gain new followers as well as its audience broadens (despite the small decline in the comScore graph); call it a race for middle America.

On what I’ve seen I still believe Digg to be far and away the best social voting destination based on its current competition. However all competition is good and I do encourage others to try and use other sites; it’s the best way of keeping Digg honest in the future.

Update: I’ve just noticed Allen Stern is hot on Propeller. Read here.

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Some users eventually go to Reddit, Propeller or any of a number of other Digg-like sites. But a disproportionate amount of them seem to be heading to Mixx, and writing about their choice.

Dave Eaves gives Mixx a thumbs up and says “I have already had quite a lot of success with getting my submissions voted on, this may be partly due to the fact that many of my digg friends have joined the site.”

Vandelay Design says “Unlike 99% of the other Digg clones, I think Mixx has a real chance for success…Mixx has a much more positive audience than Digg. It always amazes me that even the most popular and highest quality articles can get so many negative and unnecessarily degrading comments on Digg. So far the users of Mixx have proven to be quite a bit more pleasant, something that I know will be welcomed by most users.”

Finally, JD Rucker notes that a lot of top Digg users are at least experimenting with Mixx. And he mentions specifically that Greg Davies left Digg for Mixx.

Mixx users have even set up a category in their forums called Digg Refugees for users to discuss the phenomenon and spread conspiracy theories.

Compete shows traffic rising dramatically since launch, without the usual drop off that occurs after the initial press about a site dies down. It’s still a blip compared to Digg, the fact that early adopters are leaving Digg and quite vocally telling the world about it, Mixx may be a startup to keep an eye on.

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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.

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The company is led by CEO Chris McGill, formerly the General Manager of Yahoo News and more recently the VP Strategy at USA Today. The site describes itself at its core as taking the best features of Digg, LinkedIn and My Yahoo. Look for a private beta launch soon, sign up now on the landing page.

The company is almost certainly funded but won’t yet disclose any details.

We have a few conceptual screen shots, below. It’s hard to understand these without a little bit of context, but my interest is piqued. Top screen shot is the unauthenticated home page. Second is the home page when signed in. Third is “groups” view. More on Mixx soon.

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