Social media start-up Mixx sets self apart via "ultra-personalization"

Q&A: LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg and other sites provided inspiration, Mixx CEO says

Mixx.com is among the buzziest new social media sites through a blend of word-of-mouth (or e-mail), the high profile background of its founders and a good dose of anti-Digg discussion surrounding the launch. Hey, even I'm an early adopter of it. I recently shot some questions to CEO Chris McGill – formerly with USA Today and Yahoo --via e-mail and here's what he had to say about the action at Mixx since its launch in the fall.

Can you give me synopses of how and when Mixx started and what's happened since then?

The idea for Mixx bounced around in my head for more than a year. I had been watching three "pillars" of digital consumption and socialization developing on the Web: 1) Intense personalization (think netvibes, Pageflakes, myYahoo); 2) Democratization (Digg, Reddit); and 3) One-to-one contact that's controlled by the user (Linkedin and Facebook, among others). While I loved these trends, I was frustrated that I couldn't use them to find and share content relevant to my specific interests. After a conversation with my brother-in-law (an engineer for a healthcare company), who complained that he couldn't really find content that he cared about either, specifically local news and tech news in the healthcare field, there was more or less a "Shazam!" moment where the idea fully formed: the three pillars should be fused into one to create a practical media sharing site: a flexible platform where people could share content within relevant circles based on specific interests.

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Mixx.com is among the buzziest new social media sites through a blend of word-of-mouth (or e-mail), the high profile background of its founders and a good dose of anti-Digg discussion surrounding the launch. Hey, even I'm an early adopter of it. I recently shot some questions to CEO Chris McGill – formerly with USA Today and Yahoo --via e-mail and here's what he had to say about the action at Mixx since its launch in the fall.

Can you give me synopses of how and when Mixx started and what's happened since then?

The idea for Mixx bounced around in my head for more than a year. I had been watching three "pillars" of digital consumption and socialization developing on the Web: 1) Intense personalization (think netvibes, Pageflakes, myYahoo); 2) Democratization (Digg, Reddit); and 3) One-to-one contact that's controlled by the user (Linkedin and Facebook, among others). While I loved these trends, I was frustrated that I couldn't use them to find and share content relevant to my specific interests. After a conversation with my brother-in-law (an engineer for a healthcare company), who complained that he couldn't really find content that he cared about either, specifically local news and tech news in the healthcare field, there was more or less a "Shazam!" moment where the idea fully formed: the three pillars should be fused into one to create a practical media sharing site: a flexible platform where people could share content within relevant circles based on specific interests.

Since then, Mixx has taken on a life of its own. In May 2007, we received our initial funding from Intersouth Partners out of Durham, N.C., and started pulling together a team of engineering veterans, plus experts in product design and marketing, as well as an outstanding board of directors and advisers.

In late September 2007 we launched in private beta and just a few weeks later rolled out the public beta. Big media sites like USA Today, Reuters, Slate, The L.A. Times and The Weather Channel as well as hundreds of blogs have added our service and made it easy for members to easily share stories, photos and videos with other Mixxers. We've also made significant feature upgrades to the site — many based on user feedback, and rolled out new features such as publicly searchable groups.

What's the general technical infrastructure behind the site?

The site is built on Ruby on Rails and uses Apache as the Web servers and MySQL as the database. We use Rackspace Managed Hosting to host our servers, which are all Intel boxes running Linux (compare server products).

Right now we're running with two front-end application boxes, one primary database host, and a backup database host.
Our server farm also includes a development box that can be thrown into production use if load demands.

Can you share any numbers on users, traffic, growth?

Here's what we've seen in just 80 days since Mixx opened for business:

• Hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month.
• Tens of thousands of registered users – 78% of whom have personalized their Mixx pages with an average of more than 10 category tags each.
• More than 500 user-created groups.
• More than 3 million votes cast.
• In excess of 40,000 tags have been submitted by users.
• A weekly Alexa rating of 5K, with a total of 9.6K in our first three months.
• A growing and eclectic group of big media partner linkages including USA Today, Reuters, The L.A. Times, Slate, The Weather Channel, Kaboose, and uClick Comics, as well as many blogs.