Feb

29

2008

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Transition coming soon

01:59PM by Hoc

Taking a big step towards our goal of building the best communities, we will be transitioning our current communities, Ningin, Ziggytek, and Jetdrop to our new system. The date for this is currently set at March 8th, next weekend. This process will take awhile, possibly 1-2 days. During that time, all the sites will be offline. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

You can follow the progress of the transition on this blog.

Feb

27

2008

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New Logo Design

11:09AM by Hoc

Along with the site redesign, we also decided it was time for a new logo. Lan, our extremely talented Senior Designer, went through about 12 variations before we all agreed on the one you see before you. The idea was to convey that we’re a social media company, a company that creates communities with user generated content. You can imagine how hard a task it is to come up with a concise graphic that conveys that. Making things a bit more difficult, the company logo also has to look good in black and white and when shrunk down to business card size. We feel that our new logo accomplishes all those things.

The “X” with the circle as a head represents the heart of our business, the user. The content he or she creates, as represented by the radio waves, are the important links that bind all the Mixr communities together. We chose a relatively neutral color scheme not only to go with our new website design (to be followed up in a separate post), but also because we wanted to it to fit whatever future context in store for it. I’m not saying there’s a color combination that fits every situation in the known world, but it makes life a bit easier if we could just plug in what we have rather than adjust the colors every time. The color choosing process actually caused a mini debate among the Mixr staff as to what colors are really neutral. Depending on who you talk too or what website you visit, you’ll end up getting just about every color in the visible spectrum.

Everyone here at Mixr is a perfectionist to some extent, this is especially true of me. For all the work done on the logo so far, there’s a good chance we’ll do something new if something better comes along. So, we’ve been spending a lot of time on our logo, but it’s not even close to how much time we spend on building our new applications…

Feb

24

2008

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We’re more than just social news!

10:50PM by Hoc

It’s almost been a year since we first put out our version of a social news application. Since then, we’ve added tons of new features, undergone two redesigns, had over 40,000 submissions, and added two new communities, Ziggytek for cars and Jetdrop for gadgets. Suffice it say, we’ve been busy, but this year is going to be much bigger! When we first started doing this, the idea was to organize all the information related to a community—the news articles, the blog postings, the photos, the videos, the podcasts...everything. We wanted to make a central, easy to navigate resource that was all encompassing and invaluable to the niche communities we serve. Social news is the first application we launched towards that end. We plan to launch five more applications over the course of the year to create something we like to call, a social application suite; a Microsoft Office of social applications if you will. Some of these applications, blog, wiki, and forum will be available live in just a few weeks.

Speaking of blogs, we plan to bring in a lot of talented, experts in their communities, to write on various things happening within the Mixr network and on things related to communities we serve. More on that later. There’s also at least five new communities launching this year, with the next three being fashion, politics, and video games.

What’s really great about combining all these applications and communities together is that one user name, one profile, one friends list, one messaging system, one reputation, and one login will work across the entire Mixr network!

The user feedback has been interesting to hear and we always encourage comments and suggestions about everything. In general, there’s going to be more opportunities to earn points and gain reputation within a community and more awards icons and real world rewards for the more dedicated members. This blog will be updated on a much more regular basis so check back often for new features and details!