We are about to release our new event module. Not only look, feel and ease of use have been improved – it will now be even easier to manage participants.
Although mixxt is going to upgrade to a new server infrastructure, we have spruced up our old servers. Long access times and latency problems should be a thing of the past and keep you sorted until the new servers come up.
]]>The maintenance operation aims to prepare new functions and to further develop our infrastructure.
We thank you for your understanding!
]]>Providing you with more options: mixxtFREE
mixxt offers you a free alternative to Ning. A mixxt community website will provide you with most of the Ning functionality, including customizable layout, discussion forums, event management (incl. RSVP, waiting lists), sub-groups, wikis as well as file and media sharing. In addition to all features you know already, mixxt also offers several key benefits you will most probably not have seen elsewhere:
Unbeaten Community Management features
Powerful sub-groups
Full Collaboration features, not only for educational and work-related use-cases
Advanced customization
Why can mixxt provide free social networking when Ning can not?
mixxt has a completely different business model which provides us with a more versatile and stable revenue situation. Although the mixxt business model shares the Freemium Model with Ning (or at least used to), we also provide fully White Labeled networks for enterprises or large institutions. These Enterprise Communities provide high customisation, external integrations into CMS/CRM/ERP systems and custom SLAs. Our customers include ministries, pharmaceuticals, publishers, radio stations as well as universities and non-profits throughout Europe.
So apart from you being able to add Premium Features to your network for a small fee (starting at € 9 per month), large corporations can tap into our technology and expertise to deploy powerful and flexible social networking solutions. Many of our customers came into contact with us via our free and premium networks, learned to trust us and opted for one of our large Enterprise Communities. We also offer a partnership programme in some European countries that rewards Enterprise Community referrals with free Premium Services and a substantial referral fee.
In addition to all this we have revenue sharing deals with many other services and we even provide complete social networking universes, that let a company run a complete social networking kit for their employees or customers or students (similar to mixxt.com itself). The educational pricing will be out soon, so stay tuned!
mixxt is popular with: Education, work-related and event networks
Many of the existing mixxt networks are used for educational purposes, for work-groups or as event networks. The reasons for this are mainly the easy configurability, sub-groups, file- and media-sharing, our wiki and CMS systems as well as the powerful event management. Another very popular feature is our WYSIWYG-Editor that lets you include images and attach files to any content. The event management provides network creators with full RSVP abilities, automatic waiting lists, CSV exports for attendee lists and is very popular with German and European BarCamps. Participants can connect before the event and stay in touch afterwards. Who doesn’t like seeing who will be there?
A real Ning-Import
Our Ning-Importer not only imports members from your Ning network to mixxt, it will also grab all profile questions and it will also detect multiple choice answer options. Read more about the Ning-Import, backup hints and content importing here: A real Ning-Import and the migration survey.
mixxt is looking forward to providing you with a new social networking experience and helping you connect your collaborators, participants, class room or any other group members. Give it a try and create your own social network with mixxt!
]]>Ning to mixxt member import
We have just released a Ning member import that does all that and more. You even get to choose which profile questions are imported and what type of profile question it should be. The Ning-Import to mixxt lets you do some nifty stuff:
Member data review
Profile answers import
Your members will be able to login with their email address and choose a new password. Please keep in mind that you might run into legal issues if you import the member data to another service and don’t ask them for confirmation of the Terms of Service as well as the Privacy Policies. This is why the importer will not automatically activate the member accounts, they will have to activate their account themselves with one click. This keeps you on the safe side and respects the privacy of your members without impeding your networking goals.
Give it a try and create your own social network with mixxt! You can learn more about mixxt here: Welcome to a new social networking experience and a reliable Ning-Importer
Importing Ning content
Now this is a different topic altogether. Ning does not offer any content export at the moment. Grabbing content via the RSS feeds is not possible, as most feeds neither contain the full content nor the older posts. This leaves creators in a bit of a pickle. We have tried various options, but Ning will have to follow up on its promise to help creators export their content so we can provide a reliable content import. This leaves us with one major question most social networking alternatives will be asking themselves: What content do Ning network creators want to migrate? Are Ning creators interested in migrating blog posts, events, images or something else?
Ning content importing survey
Many services and developers are wondering what kind of content Ning network creators want to migrate to other solutions. We have come up with a small survey to help developers and services all over the world in providing content import features. Most of all the survey should help the Ning network creators themselves, as they will have a better chance of getting more options to migrate to. The results of the survey will be published (anonymized), so please invest two minutes of your time to tell us about your requirements: The Ning content importing survey
Premium migration service for selected networks
mixxt will help 20 selected networks to migrate to mixxt. The only thing you have to do to apply for this migration is to enter the survey about Ning content importing.
Ning exports and Backup options
Apart from the member data export in the Admin area of your Ning network, you can get a full data backup of your Ning by signing a release form and sending it to Ning via fax/mail: http://help.ning.com/?faq=3772 Your network will be deleted 30 days after requesting the data release, so you will have to close the network. Should you “only” want a backup for security reasons, the options slim down even further. You could automatically crawl and download all pages of your network by using a website archiving system (Windows: HTTrack Mac: SiteCrawler). This will not help you import your content to an alternative service, but it will at least save everything to your hard drive.
We believe mixxt is one of the best services when it comes to micro social networking, collaboration and the organization of content, events and groups. But more important than that is the necessity of free choice. We want you to have choices, one of them being mixxt.
The most exciting new feature is the all new WYSIWYG-Editor. It is available in nearly every part of your mixxt network:
The WYSIWYG-Editor not only lets you format your texts, it also lets you add images as well as files to any content. Now you can collaborate even more effectively by adding resources and documents on-the-fly.
]]>Nagios is Free Software (GPL) and monitors critical IT infrastructure components, including system metrics, network protocols, applications, services, servers, and network infrastructure.
To ensure that system, applications, services, and business processes are functioning properly, we monitor all systems—24 hours a day, 7 days a week—and are very pleased with the decent result:
During the last 300 days of 2009, the uptime of the mixxt servers (which means all mixxt hosted communities) was 99.938 %. Only 4.5 hours of downtime, plus scheduled maintenance, this is great news!
These issues are taken very seriously and we’re still working on improvements. Our servers are equipped for our strong growth and running reliable and stable, even through temporary rushes.
]]>We have added a new menu to the network settings of the administration panel called – guess what – “Statistics”. In addition to some general network information (name, domain, launch date, creator), this page provides a detailed membership analysis. The number of members – split into their their different roles (members, admins, mods) – is supplemented by it’s increase over the last week and the last month. As a further indication for activity in the community, it also shows the number of pin board entries on member profiles.
The main screen shows different values for each active feature in the community (as a reminder: you may choose from Blogs, Videos, Forums, Images, Groups, Wiki, Events, Files, Polls, Content Management and News):
On top of that, the network statistics provide information on available and used space and traffic:
And now: Go ahead and have a look at your community’s numbers! As always, your feedback is highly appreciated!
]]>In April 2007, Oliver sent our very first tweet (the short messages send via twitter) from @mixxt to the twittersphere:
Since that day, @mixxt has tweeted more than 300 times, won 500 followers and appears in 16 lists. mixxt uses Twitter for rapid response to support requests, announcements of events and updates as well as news from the mixxt office. Besides that, we pass on interesting links and information from various mixxt communities.
We can hardly imagine our Community Management without using Twitter and we really cherish this direct connection to our customers, users and partners. In addition to our English @mixxt, we’re running the very active account @mixxt_de for our German friends & followers. Our Polish support uses the Polish equivalent of Twitter named “blip”, while @mixxt_pl is not that active.
As the Twitter bio only allows you to provide a very limited amount of information, our media designer Sebastian created a fancy new background image. The image provides more detailed information about mixxt and also shows who’s twittering here. Including Photos!
Oliver (ou) and I (ne) mark our Tweets with our initials to avoid any misunderstandings and to inform our readers who they are talking to right now.
What do you think of the new background on our Twitter profile? Are you satisfied with our support via Twitter? Is there anything we can improve? Just drop us a line or a tweet!
*BTW: In the not too distant future, we will launch a new FAQ section on mixxt.com and improve our help pages to improve our user support.
]]>Previously, mixxt users were able to search terms and keywords in some single modules, like the forum, members or content management. The new global search allows users to expand their search from one module to the entire community. In the search results, choosing “search the whole network” next to the search box leads the user to community-wide results. Users can show or hide the results from the modules ( members, forums, images, wiki, events, blogs, files, videos, content management, polls, groups) by clicking the respective icons:
Search operators:
Some operators are available to improve the results:
mixxt & Community – finds any content containg the term mixxt AND the term Community
mixxt | Community – finds any content which either contains the term mixxt OR the term community or both
mixxt -Community – finds any content containing the term mixxt but NOT the term Community
The wiki editor now offers a toolbar with formatting options. This makes the handling of wiki pages much easier for non-techie users and helps them with font sizes, bullet points, headlines, links or anchors.
In one of our last updates, we have already added an administrators’ shoutbox to post directly into the lifestream. From now on, every administrator may add a shoutbox to the main page which – depending on the privacy settings – allows every member to post and shout some words (400 characters!) right into their community. The shoutbox is ideal for status updates, announcements and tips, to post links or even for short dialogues. Not only every network may now have it’s own shoutbox, but also every group can place it on it’s start page!
Your feedback is highly appreciated, have you already spotted some nice shouts in the wild? Stay tuned via our twitter updates!
]]>We have added a new menu to the mixxt-settings to activate or deactivate “global friendships”. If both users have activated this feature, they will automatically become friends in the networks (only for realname and public nickname networks) they join in the future. Of course, members will always be able to end friendships manually.
Bonus: User A has enabled global friendships and joins a network. User B, an “old” friend of A, already is a member but has not activated global friendships yet. User B then automatically receives a friend request from A, which contains a hint to activate global friendships. This helps us to communicate this new feature more quickly and minimises the amount of friend requests and confirmations for each user very fast.
As we have already pointed out the pros and cons of global friendships in the latest blogpost: Most of our users and admins hold a membership in only one network which means that this feature appears to be needless or might even irritate them. The desire for global friendships mainly arose from barcampers and webworkers, who actively participate in many of our networks. This feature has been a hot topic in many internal discussions and we finally decided to pay tribute and respect to the whole BarCamp and web2.0 scene by making their wishes come true ;)
mixxt would like to take this opportunity to ask our users, customers, readers, friends and supporters to become a fan of mixxt. We have set up a Facebook page to collect and organise various information about mixxt and the mixxt team. Do you like mixxt? Then click here and become a fan: mixxt page at Facebook. Thank you very much! Your Feedback is highly appreciated.
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