October 14, 2007
Mixx, opened the public beta on the Web few days ago, is a new people-curated site that want to challenge the market leadership of Digg and Reddit. It offered their users a new way to read news, view photos, or watch videos according to their own preferences.
In fact, Mixx is promoting the concept of deliver the relevant, individually tailored content to their users. In other words, users can now personalize the site, by selecting the news that fit their interests, or choose the categories that they like in the first place in addition to create private groups. Key to Mixx’s strategy was to provide the different user experience that Digg, Reddit, or any Digg clone were “not” doing at this moment. Mixx was aimed to let users find the content or read the news instantaneously without having to dig through a lot of stuff that other users thought that those are important. No doubt, Mixx users can submit, vote or against any article, news, photo or video to the Mixx site and normally the top one will display on the main Mixx site according to the votes received. However, this does not means users are not allowed to customize the news that they wanted to receive in the first hand. Mixx build a YourMixx, a customized start page that allowed a registered user to fully control the news that she want to receive at the time she sign-up to the site, she can tweak and filter the content she intended to read according to the categories selected. This contrast to the normal practices of other Digg clones such as Sk*rt, Yasvs, Hugg, or Yahoo! Minna Japan that I covered in this blog.
I believed Mixx users are also bought into the value proposition and trust that they’ll get the better content they want due to the “Local feature” developed by Mixx. According to Mixx, the Local feature makes it really easy to find and share things that are relevant to your hometown, where your parents live, or pretty much anywhere in the US. Meanwhile, Mixx also built tools, Mixx Lounge for the purpose on how karma points are to be awarded that might help in attracting more new users to their site.
Update: Mixx, is a product of a McLean, Va. company called Recommended Reading. It previously has raised $1.5 million of seed funding led by Intersouth Partners. In February 2008, Mixx also raised an additional $2 million from the same backer in a Series A funding.
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