I signed up to the new Mixx beta over the weekend and whilst I haven’t had much time to play with it yet, it’s certainly a lot cleaner and easier to navigate than I expected from (with apologies to Susan Merritt) Yet Another News Aggregator (With Social Networking Features). What I can’t quite get my head around is what exactly it’s for.
Techcrunch see it as a new take on social news, a “a sort of cross between Digg, LinkedIn and MyYahoo“. It seems to be another run at the idea of personal news pages (which strikes me as a very overcrowded market) combined with Digg/StumbleUpon style approval ratings for stories. Stories are submitted via a simple enough interface. The ability to submit RSS (which is what it desperately needs) is on the way. To be honest, apart from admiring the refreshingly clean, uncluttered interface, it’s impossible to tell. The social features are no better and no worse than those on the new Digg profiles, the news categories are pretty much identical to Digg. On the surface, why would you need them both?
Well…
Mixx scores in two areas which have always frustrated me about Digg – you can tag submissions and you can place new stories in more than one category. Also, Mixx already supports pictures and videos. On Digg, pictures are ‘coming’. The social features on Mixx are integrated from the start rather than the slightly ‘bolted-on’ feel of Digg’s profiles (and there’s evidence that the user community are decidedly unenamoured of Digg’s new features). The idea of peer groups developing organically around my own set of interests is attractive as well, though I’m already quite thoroughly wedded to del.icio.us for that one.
Meanwhile, the 800lb gorilla that is Google playing a little catchup on its own booking-marking features, though a little polish seems to be needed. And the there’s always the del.icio.us redesign (though I’m going to miss the dots).
Filed under: Social Network Portability, corporate, social bookmarking, social media | Tagged: bookmarks, Mixx
