I’m happy to announce (a few days late) that Mixx has gone beta and we’re slowly letting people in to hammer away on the system.

What is Mixx, you ask? Well, Mixx is what I’ve been working on for the last three months with my incredibly talented friends and co-workers. Mixx is our take on social news. We’ve drawn inspiration from sites such as Digg and My Yahoo! to create something new and (we think) unique. For those not familiar with those sites/services, the basics are:

• Anyone with an account can submit a link to the site, adding categories, tags, and locations to the story to help make the link more findable.
• Everyone else can vote the story, photo, or video up or down depending on how they feel about the link’s content.
• Anyone with an account can create private groups for sharing links between your friends or other real-world or online social groups (I created a Refresh DC group, for instance, for sharing links with local web designers and developers).
• Users can also customize their “YourMixx” page (essentially your homepage on the site) by browsing around the site and clicking “Add to YourMixx” buttons.

These are just the basics, there’s a whole host of other features and design niceties that I’ll talk about more in other posts. In this post, I wanted to give a brief overview of what I’ve been working on (and why a lot of you haven’t heard form me!).

Some of you more web-savvy users out there will likely decry Mixx as a “clone” or “copycat” of the services I’ve mentioned above. To you, I say this: fine. If your news needs are being filled by another service, that’s great. The web is a large enough community that there’s room for everyone. Some will be more successful than others, yes. It is my firm belief, however, that building a pleasant, self-governing community is more important than having the most users, page views, or whatever other metric you wish to apply.

Stepping down from that small soapbox, I’d encourage everyone to go visit Mixx, throw your email address our way, and we’ll let you in on the ground floor. We’re looking to beta test for about a month or so with a full-scale launch sometime in October. We’re also really looking for useful critiques and feedback during this beta testing period, so if you’re in the beta, please (pretty please?) let us know what you think. The site’s for you, after all.