It’s March, which means our sports fans are in for a big slice of heaven: College basketball. Hockey playoffs right around the corner. Baseball preseason in full swing. Football… well, we’re sure there’s something going on there, too. To put it simply: Everyone’s getting their game face on, which made us think that it might be a great time to roll out our new Mixx Profile page! It’s kind of your Mixx face, right? No? Oh, er. Anyway—on to the new Mixx Profile Page!

The first thing you’ll notice about your new Profile page is that all of the info is now neatly organized in three columns:

In Column 1:

• Your avatar and user name
• Edit and Invite links for your profile
• Links to Follow User, Block User or send MixxMail
• Your Badge(s), Karma points, your “maven” status (assuming you’re a SuperMixxer, of course!)

Getting tired of seeing all those default avatars? We are too, but because we know that our Mixxers may just be a little too busy to do anything about it, we’re going to help out: From now on, your friend JohnnyBoy263 won’t have that sad, generic, default avatar. Nope–now it might be Bill Gates or Tonya Harding or Robert Downey Jr. And that avatar will appear wherever his name shows up on Mixx. To make it even more interesting, we’re going to keep changing JohhnyBoy’s avatar until he gets tired of the game and decides to make his own avatar. But who knows? Maybe his inner Zsa Zsa will come out and he’ll be okay sticking with that one. And you know what? We’re okay with that, too. Enjoy!

As a super special added bonus, we have included a “special” pic in the Mixx.  The first person to identify correctly who the little girl in the glasses is will get a Mixx t-shirt.  So what are you waiting for?  Get out there and find that little four eyes!  Once you find her, either send a site mail to Feedback or drop an e-mail to Feedback.

In Column 2:

• Your latest status
• Space to update your status or write a note if you’re viewing the profile of a Mixx Friend
• New tabs for Activity (all of your submissions, votes for, votes against, favorites and comments), Information (your description, links, groups, location and interests) and Chatter (any comments that people leave on your profile and all of the status updates you’ve created—we know that’s a lot, so the Chatter items only stay for two weeks)

And just for fun, if you haven’t created a Profile yet, we’ve given you a temporary one! At the very top of the second column you’ll see this message, “We have you listed as a 24 year old male who lives with his mom, is a candle stick maker, and likes puppy kisses and unicorns. Does this sound about right? If not, click here to edit your profile and tell us all about you.” If this isn’t you, go ahead and write your own and we’ll take down ours!

In Column 3:

• Your Friends
• Your Trophy Case

Wait! Don’t leave yet—there’s more!

MixxFeed—Notifications on Steroids
Okay—perhaps we shouldn’t use the word “steroids” since we opened with a lame sports theme. Just try to ignore that; this is pretty cool: With MixxFeed you can choose certain site activities that you want to stay on top of. Just go to YourMixx and click on the MixxFeed tab. NOTE: MixxFeed content will only appear under this tab—no email alerts and it won’t appear under “Notifications.”

We know this is a lot, so just one more thing before we go:

Twittering and Facebooking
Sharing is good, and we’ve made it easier to share all of your fantabulous Mixx posts and finds: Every story, photo, podcast and video includes Tweet This and Share on Facebook links.

That’s it! Now go make sure you’re not one of those puppy kisses and unicorns guys and then check out all of the great new features!

Happy Mixxing and, as always, let us know what you think!

The Mixx Team

We’ve had this question pop up a couple of times (most recently from emitstop on Twitter): Mixxers want to know what Team Mixx thinks about Greasemonkey.

If you’re not familiar with Greasemonkey, let’s bring you up to speed. Greasemonkey is an extension for the Firefox web browser (our favorite!) that allows you to enhance webpages using small, installable scripts. There’s a very large repository of scripts that you can install available at Userscripts.org. If you poke around Userscripts.org for any amount of time, you’ll find great scripts for some of your favorite sites (other than Mixx, of course) like YouTube, Digg, and FriendFeed.

Here at Mixx World Headquarters, we strive to bring you the tools you need to have the best possible social experience on the web. There’ll be cases though where there’s some little feature or enhancement that you want that we just haven’t gotten around to yet. This is where Greasemonkey can come in handy!

So, to answer the questions directly: We don’t mind our Mixxers using Greasemonkey scripts so long as those scripts don’t do anything mean, nasty, or nefarious. This means you shouldn’t use a script of any kind to violate our Terms of Use. Go on, give ‘em a read. They’re pretty straightforward and actually kind of entertaining. If you’re concerned that a script you’re using may violate our Terms of Use, drop us a line at feedback@mixx.com and we’ll deal with it. You should feel comfortable doing this without having to fear the banhammer.

We hope that answers your questions about Mixx and Greasemonkey. Now go write some cool scripts!

~ Jason

So that pesky little Punxsutawney Phil insists we’ll have six more weeks of winter. The weather has been pretty screwed up this year anyway, so we’ve been staying inside, working away to bring a little sunshine and cheer to you, our wonderful Mixxers.

New Mixx Front Page
First up, we’re launching a new Front Page that combines many of the popular features throughout Mixx. While we originally designed and built this page with non-Mixxers in mind, we love it and, being the good little web citizens that we are, we thought we’d share! And since we’re all about personalization here—as evidenced by Will’s Famous Plaid Plants—now you can have your choice of Mixx Start Page!  Choose from YourMixx, the new Front Page or even your Notifications page as your Mixx Start Page. Make this selection in your Account Settings. We just want to make sure that, as often as possible, we’re giving you the option to make it your Mixx. As always, we’d love to get feedback on the new page.

Writing a Mixx Poll is Good for Your Karma
The Mixx polls have become one of our most popular features, and we’ve decided to reward those of you who create them. From now on, Mixxers who write polls selected for publication will be paid in the currency of the Mixx realm—that’s right: Karma and props! Note: Everyone will know that you wrote the poll, so make it a good one, and keep it clean; your mom is watching! The Mixxer who has the most polls published will also get a special Pollster badge to add to their profile page.  So start writing!

Them’s Fightin’ Words!
We know that people can get a little passionate about certain topics, but occasionally that passion can get out of hand and lead to needlessly argumentative comments and even behavior that borders on the troll-ish. Well, that’s not something we ever want to see on Mixx, so you are hereby deputized to mark these comments as “Fighting Words.” Just two Mixxers or one Super Mixxer is all it takes to hide those comments from view. Now, no going crazy with the deputy’s badge: you can only mark 10 comments in a day.  Also, you have a choice—if you are the sparring kind, you can choose to see the comments marked as “Fighting Words” by default. Otherwise, they will be hidden from view unless you ask to see them.

Enjoy!
~The Mixx Team

Well, the holiday season has come to a close. The New Year has arrived. The champagne bottles are empty and that festive buzzing in our heads has finally cleared. So it must be time to get to the 2009 goodies—including a few oft-requested items!

Kudos Redux
We’re giving each and every SuperMixxer 20 Kudos to hand out every day. Not a SuperMixxer yet? You’ll still get ten Kudos to award to other Mixxers. Hop over to the Mixx Lounge where you’ll find the kudos “leader board” featuring:

• The top five comments in terms of kudos
• The Mixxer making the comment, and how many kudos it has received
• A Link to the comment

Claim It!
Now you don’t need to go to a partner website to lay claim to a story, photo, podcast or video. Every anonymously submitted item now offers you the ability to claim it—right on the Mixx site.

Share 2.0
We think that almost everything can be made better—and easier to use. In that spirit, we’ve been tinkering with the “Share” feature. Now you can create Share Lists of specific followers and view the entire history of your Shares. We know that for some of you, this will take a bit a lot of scrolling, but we haven’t had time to do anything about that yet. But then again, our mom always told us that sharing was good, so maybe a bit of scrolling through that history isn’t such a bad thing!  Check out the share lists at http://www.mixx.com/share_lists

Of course there are also a few site notification tweaks, some that you can file under YAURF*:

Following:

• When someone follows you and you follow them back, the original notification (“Bob is now following you”) will change to “You are now following Bob.” Leave the page and then return and you won’t see the Follow notification again.
• If you choose to “Follow All,” that little yellow message box will still show up at the top, but when you come back to the page, the original notification will be gone.

Submission and Groups:

• Click on a submission and it will automatically be marked as read and removed from your notification list. This way you won’t have to pretend to ignore notifications you’ve already read.
• Oh, and you’ll find that we’ve changed the whole “ignore” thing to “Mark as read.” We thought it was a little friendlier and smarter, since, you know, you’re not actually ignoring it if you’ve already read it.

Share:
Hurrah! One notification, and one notification only, for each Share from each Sharer.

Friends:
Now you’ll only get one active Friend notification when another Mixxer decides that you are way to cool to NOT Follow. If they’re desperate for you to love them in return (and you know they are!), they’ll probably ask more than once. This new request will automatically update the timestamp of the existing Friend request notification instead of sending another notification. One notification—new timestamp: Much cleaner inbox.

Well that’s it for this round, but we do want to thank you again for your support and your enthusiastic embrace of Mixx. We haven’t yet found the perfect words, so for now, “Thank you” will have to do. Mixx just wouldn’t be the same without you!

We’re really excited about this New Year and the amazing changes in store for Mixx, and hopefully for all of you. So, here’s to new things, and we’ll see you in the Mixx!

- Your Mixx Team

* Yet Another User Request Fulfilled

This time of year brings a host of celebrations and it seems like everyone is reconnecting with friends and family, sharing a few drinks, having some laughs, and swapping stories. Think Facebook. Live! With eggnog! Now, in addition to a few other holiday goodies, Mixx is making it easy for you to reconnect. We’ve added a People Search feature so that you can find out which of your friends is also a Mixxer—and let your friends find you.

Simply use the regular search box and enter any name in the search field. On the results page, you’ll see a new “People” tab that will show a list of matching names. If you’re not yet a registered Mixxer, 1) What are you waiting for?, and 2) Now that you are absolutely going to do this because Mixx is the coolest place to be, you have the option to enter your name during registration. If you are already part of the coolest place, then you can go to your account page and add your name so your friends can find you. Note that this will NOT show up on your profile, or be attached to any content that you submit, comment on or vote for. It will ONLY show up if someone searches for you by name.

In the spirit of the season, we thought we’d share some of the other holiday treats we’ve been working on:

• The Trophy Case: We know how proud you are of those awards—for some of you it’s become almost unseemly how badly you want to win. (Don’t worry—we approve!) For months now we’ve been tracking all of those awards and now you can show them off in your very own Trophy Case—you’ll find a link to it on your profile page. If you don’t see a link, um, you might need to get Mixxing.
• Polls Improvements: The Polls feature has quickly become one of our most popular, and many of you have offered suggestions for poll topics, as well as ways for us to improve the feature. So consider this YAURF!™*
  • Yes, you can go home again, or at least back to closed polls.
  • Your comments and conversations on polls will now appear in Your Conversations.
  • The Polls tab can now be found in the Category tabs as well as in Popular.
  • Suggest a Poll! Tell what burning question you want answered.
• New Mixx Tour: At last! Whether you’re new to Mixx or just want a quick refresher (or even to just admire more of our handiwork), there’s now an easy-to-navigate tour of the best Mixx has to offer, from finding and sharing content to voting and, yes, even making friends. Check out the new Mixx Tour and let us know what you think!

Now if you’ll excuse us, we just saw a very large pitcher of eggnog go by. We were going to resolve to leave it alone but instead we resolve to keep working to make Mixx the place you want to be, today and every day. Wherever you are, have a safe and wonderful New Year! We can’t wait to see what 2009 brings, but we hope we’ll see you in the Mixx soon!

~Your Not-at-all-tipsy Mixx Team

*YAURF™: Yet Another User Request Fulfilled