My Home -> Friends -> Invite Friends.

Add as many email addresses as you want and whenever they accept the invite you and your invitee will automagically be friends. Even if someone else invited the same person or if they accept the invitation under a different email address they’ll be added to your friends list and you’ll get credited for the invite. What does being credited for the invite get you? Nothing much now, but something very important soon!

Another new feature is the ability to see your friend’s request in the login area. With our universal login system, you’ll see the friend’s request no matter which Mixr community you visit.

There’s been a dozen of quiet bug fixes as well and everything is a work in progress folks, so thanks for your patients. Our efforts right now are on our microsites that we’re developing with our content partners and our video streaming solution. I’ll go into more details about those in a later post.

Also, you’ll find many of the Mixr staff at the AAFilmLab 72 Hour Shootout launch party that our Ningin community is sponsoring. It’ll in lower Manhattan this Friday 6/20 at 6pm.

The goal we have with Ningin is the goal we have for every one of our communities – we want it to be the definitive resource for the niche that it serves. In Ningin’s case, it’s Asian media. Today, we took a big step towards that by partnering up with the Asian American Film Lab and their 72 Hour Shootout short film competition. We’ll be creating a special microsite for them where their members and our users can watch streaming videos of all the participants and read blog updates provided by our own Ningin bloggers. The microsite will be live on June 16th. There’s more to it than just that, so read the full press release for more details.

So far this is our first partnership and our first microsite. It’s been a lot of fun and something we would like to do more of in the future.

We apologize for any inconvenience during that time and while we can’t promise it won’t happen again, we do promise to resolve in as quickly as we can.

In case you’re curious, the name came from irreverent commentary on the seemingly majority of NFL teams—very few receivers open when the quarterback wants to throw to them.

There are a couple things we’re doing that are different from our pre-existing communities. We’re looking to build sub-communities within a larger umbrella NFL community. The sub-communities are delineated by individual NFL teams. Also, instead of building out each site for each NFL team, we’re asking users to pre-register. When enough people pre-register, then we’ll create the team sites. This process also allows users to sign-up as potential bloggers, moderators, and administers saving us some time in finding these people anyway. Users can register from any of our communities or sub communities. Once registered, they can visit and interact with any of our sites—one account, multiple communities.

To start, each team site will just be Forums and we’ll layer in Blogs and a Community Page. The main NobodyOpen site will soon have Social News. However, our platform affords us the flexibility to add or remove apps depending on the demand of each site.

Overall this method allows for a very organic growth. Prior to this, we were able to grow communities in three ways: more apps, more bloggers, and more features. Now we’re able to build communities within communities, each with their own branching growth paths.

Our General Counsel wants to add the following disclaimer to this post: NobodyOpen.com is not affiliated with the National Football League. All views expressed on that website are our own or of our community members.

We’ve added a new slideshow feature that highlights the more extraordinary content on our Ningin community. Since the new design, one of the things that seem missing with images. We’ve always been a very graphic heavy site mixed with minimalist design elements. The new design made our homepage seem text heavy. Well it’s been improved! Articles and post selected to the slideshow are generally things that are really popular on the community. So it’s the users that determine what appears there. On occasion, we’ll add things of lesser popularity if the editorial or moderating team feel it’s underexposed and worth more attention.

The community page is still not entirely finished. There are more apps and features we’ve yet to code or finish testing, but we’re getting there!

On a different note, we decided to stop using Google ads on our Ningin site. For some reason, we draw a lot of Asian dating and marriage ads. We’re not against those services, but that’s not what Ningin is about. 

Forum Visitor Stats was something on our to-do list for awhile since the forum was launched about three weeks ago. The delay was due to issues trying to separate visitors from our different communities. We didn’t think it would make sense to show Jetdrop or Ziggytek visitors on the Ningin site. In any case, that’s done so now you can see who’s online with our Ningin forums! Every site has more guest than users, but it would be really nice if you guests sign up and join the community!

We’ve also been busy adding bloggers to our Ningin community. It’s about one a week now, a pace I don’t expect us to continue, but great for now. The goal is to have a little of everything content wise without too much overlap. So far we have Alvin Lin for general Asian media and Asian American politics, Andrew Lim for Hong Kong gossip and Asian foods, and guest blogger Daron Jenkins for Asian film reviews. We’ve created an expanded blogger profile page to highlight all our different bloggers. One for Ningin, and one for Jetdrop. We’re still looking for a few more, so if you or your friends are interested, then this page is for you.

Beta testers can still access our sites during this process.

7:45am EST - Took sites offline, starting upgrades and changes.
1:10pm EST - Server is going offline for about 10 mins while we make updates.
4:50pm EST - Jetdrop and Ziggytek now online. There’s a good chance you need to refresh your browser. Beta testers, please focus on Ningin.
7:00pm EST - Ningin is online. Redesign done!

This blog will be up and continually updated with near real-time progress (read, I’ll update when I can). Expect big design changes and a new application! Beta testers should still be able to login while we work. As always, we look forward to everyone’s feedback. 

Visit his blog:http://ningin.com/andrewlim/
Subscribe to his RSS feed: http://ningin.com/andrewlim/rss_2.0/

Andrew Lim Biography:

Andrew Lim currently lives in New York City. He was born in Malaysia and came to the States to pursue his college education when he was 18. An avid fan of travelling, Andrew has been to over 30 countries. He flies frequently for work and fun. Andrew has so much inflight experience that he can perform the inflight safety demonstration much better than any of the flight attendants. Just don’t ask him to blow into the tube of the life jacket or you will regret it.

In his spare time, Andrew loves to eat. He has a strong knowledge of great restaurants across many cities, especially those servings Asian food. Friends of Andrew have always trusted him with giving them advice on where to dine. They have also trusted him with ordering for the table whenever he is present at the dining party. The only problem is, he tends to over order.

Andrew is also the go to person for all the latest and greatest Asian celebrity news and gossips. His friends often turn to him for a quick fix of juicy Asian celebrity gossip. Andrew loves to talk. If he’s not talking, he’s eating. He even talks in his sleep.

With all these going on, you probably expect Andrew not to hold a full time job. He does have one. Andrew is a food trends researcher and has worked with major food and beverage manufacturers like PepsiCo as well as retailers like Wal*Mart. His recent work project includes researching prepared meals/snacks purchase trends of the Mainland Chinese.

Andrew is severely allergic to tree pollens, cats and dogs (thank god not to any food items!). His last allergy test also indicated that he was allergic to dust, roaches and rats. Boy, did he pick a wrong city to live in!

We need to take down the server for about 1 hour on Wednesday morning around 6am for maintenances. We’re also be adding a pretty cool new feature currently in stealth beta testing!

Thanks in advance for your patience!