Business | Technology

Mix.com is a mixture of good and bad

Mixx has to do more if it wants to reach its self-proclaimed goal.

  • By Scott Shuey, Chief Business Reporter
  • Published: 00:33 April 19, 2008
  • Gulf News

When Mixx.com launched in September 2007, its self-proclaimed goal was to bring "web content that really matters" to its users.

To accomplish this, Mixx adopted the approach Digg.com applies to news. Users submit links that are then voted on (yea or nay) by other readers. Popular stories quickly rise to the top. It's a strategy that has worked well for Digg.

However, Mixx's attempt to apply that formula to the web doesn't work nearly so well. There is often a mix of the relevant, the unusual, and a fair amount of utter rubbish. The same could be said of Digg, so to illustrate my point, I offer a few examples.

Under the science tab, the top link is "President Bush would be a great bald ibis". The scientific value of the story was, to put it mildly, limited. Under the interest tab was "10 reasons why drinking water is good for your health". The obvious answer - because you'll die without - didn't appear in the story.

What was really funny was the breaking news: there was none. One of the things that drew me to this site is its recently publicised relationship with the Los Angeles Times and Reuters. I don't want a site that tells me "It's a slow news" and then tells me to check the popular stories. I just don't believe you.

The whole point of Mixx is to customise links that are relevant to you, but the sites lacks the ability to correctly categorise or filter out content. It's another case of right idea, bad execution.

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