These numbers are even more impressive if you consider that Mixx only had about 1 million unique in May.

Since then, Mixx has added a number of new features, including Mixx Communities, but most importantly, it seems the size of the Mixx community itself has reached a tipping point. In its anniversary blog post, Mixx diplomatically attributes its growth to all the "fabulous, intelligent and wonderful Mixxers," but it is also clear that Mixx's strategy of partnering with large content providers is finally starting to pay dividends for the company.

Our initial impression of Mixx was very positive and the new features the company has added since then have only solidified our opinion of Mixx as a very useful social news site for mainstream users.

At the same time, though, it is also worth pointing out that Digg now gets about 30 million unique visitors a month. Digg's Kevin Rose has admitted, however, that the site needs to become more relevant to mainstream users if it wants to keep growing. As Mixx is already geared towards mainstream users, we think that is should be able to continue its rapid growth for the foreseeable future.

Social news site Mixx introduced a new feature today: Mixx Communities. Mixx always had a strong emphasis on 'groups,' but the Mixx Communities take this to a different level by offering a higher degree of customizability and a stronger emphasis on communication between group members.

There has been a recent trend of allowing groups of users to take greater control over their experiences on social news sites and Mixx's efforts add some interesting ideas to this.

Setting up a Mixx community is very straightforward. Besides deciding on obvious things like a name, color scheme, and categories, users can chose to pre-populate their community with content already available in Mixx by importing items tagged with up to ten different keywords.

The communities also feature their own message boards and the ability to add polls. There is also a 'member lounge', where the recent activities of group members are displayed. Karma points a user earns in one of the communities are added to the 'general Mixx karma pool', an important feature for many power-users who tend to jealously guard their status on the site.

Mixx communities are somewhat similar to Reddit's sub-reddit feature, which also allows users to create their own hosted communities. Reddit, however, does not allow for any degree of customization, but it does have more granular access controls than Mixx. All Mixx communities are open to all users, while Reddit has public, restricted, and private modes. Update: Mixx does actually have very similar access controls to Reddit's - but they are not part of the set-up procedure like Reddit's are and have to be set after the community is created.

Now that Reddit has open-sourced its code, anybody can of course create any kind of reddit-clone, but the communities on Mixx cater to a different audience.

Making Money

The 5th step in the set-up process is probably the most interesting one for publishers: Set Up Advertising & Revenue Share. Mixx allows publishers to link their Google AdSense account to their Mixx Community page and then shares 50% of the revenue with the publisher.

This will probably help Mixx to gain a larger following among small to mid-sized blogs and maybe even some larger publishers who will create their own communities on the site. Still, social news sites are notoriously hard to monetize through pay-per-click ads and I wouldn't expect most community owners to make a lot of money from this.

Making Users Happy

Allowing users to take greater control of their experience seems to be a trend among social news sites lately. As these communities grow, some users often start to feel alienated. Allowing for the creation of more formalized sub-groups most likely helps to retain a lot of these users who still feel very attached to the service.

It will be interesting to see if Mixx's competitors like Digg, Newsvine, and Propeller are going to follow suit here anytime soon. Digg especially, because of the sheer size and diversity within its community would probably benefit from allowing users to create smaller Diggs on its site, too.

For some reason, though, it doesn't have much traffic. Mixx will issue a report tomorrow summarizing progress since work began on the site one year ago. The company is releasing traffic stats that show a nearly 3X increase in visitors in May. The surprise after all this good news? Fewer than 1 million people visited Mixx last month, less than 5% of the traffic that competitor Digg saw. Given the circumstances, Mixx's glaring lack of success to date calls a number of things about this industry into question.

Mixx functionality is now baked into the websites of USATODAY, LATimes, CNN, NYTimes, Reuters, NPR, Slate, Weather.com and an unknown number of blogs. The company has taken investment from the LA Times, undoubtedly a part of why all these other publishers are willing to consider working with Mixx. No doubt those sites also want to see a phenomenon like Digg that they can win on; publishing partner sites get preferential display on Mixx. That's something that would-be repeat visitors might not appreciate.

You would think that if that integration was executed effectively and if those sites' visitors had any interest in voting on news stories - Mixx should be getting far, far more traffic than it is. There are many sites around the web who get more than 1 million unique viewers each month without links in every story on some of the biggest sites on the internet. Something in implementation or strategy is going very, very wrong.

Mixx users might really like having a small, focused community on the site. That makes sense for them. Having this small a community on the site does not make sense for Mixx's owners and investors though and is not likely to prove a viable situation over the long term. Maybe the site's traffic will more than double next month, though, and perhaps that will happen again in July.

Introduction to User Experience Has Been Weak

Until only recently, first time visitors to Mixx were greeted with an incredibly hostile landing page containing a joke that couldn't have gone over well with new visitors to the site. When they clicked on the Mixx button on a partner page, to vote for a story, visitors were taken to a page that read: "Stop right there - we're going to have to see some ID." Thankfully that page was replaced with a proper landing page days after the CNN partnership began, and it could only have hurt unique visitors so much, but it sure seemed wacky.

Mixx isn't bragging about the number of registered users it has, why does it require users to register in order to participate on the site? Traffic from CNN is a beautiful thing, why not be thankful and let all of convert to users who have interacted with the site whether they've created an account or not?

Does Mainstream Media Even Want to Get It?

More to the point, just like CNN puts links to headlines from The Onion on its front page with no mention of them being satire - so too do these big publishers' efforts with Mixx seem poorly executed. Integration with social media services, particularly ones that take readers off-site, appear to be something that big publishers are doing begrudgingly and in a half-baked way.

Maybe mainstream media readers don't want to click on widgets, don't want to create more accounts on websites unknown to them and maybe they don't even want to vote on the news! Those seem like potential takeaways from a glimpse at Mixx's traffic. It's an awful shame and we hope that something can be done to expose more people to the innovative work going on there.

Web Apps

The Favorite Web Apps of RWW Readers

A couple of weeks ago we held a competition, asking you to tell us what web 2.0 apps most excite you currently. We had a great response, with 113 comments. I decided to list each web app mentioned in a spreadsheet and count up the most popular. What surprised me was the number of web apps that got at least one mention: 161. No doubt some of those were left by the developers themselves, but many were left by seemingly passionate users. The most popular were the usual suspects: Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed, Google Reader. See our post for the full list.

BlogRize: Social News Gets Personal

The idea behind BlogRize is that the "wisdom of the crowds" works best if you have the right crowd. While sites like Digg.com have chosen to go mainstream, BlogRize believes that finding the best content from the web should be a more personal experience. To achieve this goal, BlogRize's solution is to build news communities based on the blogs you like reading the most...blogs like the one you're reading now, for example.

Related:

• How Best to Submit Our (Or Any) Stories to Digg
• The Decline and Fall of Quality on Digg
• Mixx Launches Innovative API - Continues to Challenge the Digg Experience
• Yahoo! Tries to Spread Buzz, Adds Widgets, RSS

Facebook Hacked Again

A report on BBC's technology program, Click, has exposed yet another security flaw in Facebook - one that could comprise users' privacy. This particular hack involves using a Facebook application to steal a users personal information - and the information of all their friends - without the user's knowledge.

Related:

• Report: In Emergencies, People Turn to Facebook

Adobe to Publish Flash File Format Specs

Adobe announced this week the "Open Screen Project", which will seek to create a consistent runtime environment for rich media across a myriad of devices. In other words, Flash on the web, mobile, desktop, television, and other consumer electronic devices. As part of this initiative, Adobe will be releasing the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv/f4v) and removing all licensing restrictions involved with the Flash format. In the future, the project will be expanded to include AIR.

YouTube Aims to Monetize in a Post-TV Era

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made big promises of mysterious, highly-interactive new methods of monetizing YouTube in a CNBC interview this week. "We believe the best products are coming out this year," he said. "And they're new products. They're not announced. They're not just putting in-line ads in the things that people are trying."

As all established media (not just newspapers) face a growing challenge from the internet, with its on-demand, highly personalized and infinitely interactive social connections - can TV, and TV on the internet, learn keep up with the times?

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Dancing With Gorillas: The New Web Era

This week we ran an intriguing 3-part series, by Bernard Lunn, on the new Web. Part 1 was The Whatchamacallit, Post Recession Phase Transition, Part 2 was The Emerging Main Street Web. Part 3, Dancing With Gorillas, is highlighted here -- but do read the whole series!

The new Web era is about the mainstream. This is when millions of small businesses and digital free agents make a good living by providing better products to a much more savvy market. This is the point in the Crossing the Chasm model when all the innovation stops, start-ups get consolidated into a few mega players and it all gets a bit boring until the next wave of innovation hits us.

Nevermind The Recession, The Web Will Change The World!

Since the Web 2.0 Expo last week, two parallel questions are being asked about the current era of the Web:

a) Are we about to enter into a recession, and if so does that mean an end to the current 'web 2.0' era of innovation in web technology?;
b) Why aren't we (meaning startups) tackling the "big, hard problems" with web technologies?

In this post we explore those questions. See also Sarah Perez's post entitled Wanted: 5 Startups To Change the World, in which she commented on Umair Haque's open challenge to Silicon Valley: find a problem to fix that will change the world for the better and he will help you do it.

Interview: How Will Live Mesh Integrate With Windows Live?

One of the highlights last week at Web 2.0 Expo was the launch of Microsoft's new cloud computing play, Live Mesh. Mesh is a new development platform for syncing user data between the desktop and the Web, and across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but it'll support mobile, Mac computers and other devices in the future). It can sync data for single users, as well as create shared spaces for multiple users. Currently Live Mesh is in "technology preview", so it is not a finished product. Even so, we couldn't help but notice the overlap between Live Mesh and a number of Windows Live products.

To find out more about how Live Mesh will integrate with Windows Live, RWW editor Richard MacManus interviewed Microsoft's Brian Hall - GM of Development for the Windows Live Platform.

An Ode to RSS, On RSS Awareness Day

There's just a few hours left in what should be an international holiday - RSS Awareness Day. Thought up by the good folks at DailyBlogTips.com and unknown until this morning to even RSS forefather Dave Winer, RSS Awareness Day is a fantastic idea. May 1st is a lot of things already but what the heck, let's pile another one on. We'd like to take a few minutes to reflect on the world-changing tool that RSS is, and consider how different our lives would be without it.

Related:

• Can Web Apps Get Too Drunk on Aggregation?

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

AltSearchEngines Update

By ASE Editor Charles Knight:

This past week at AltSearchEngines was a very rich one for the quality and quantity of our Guest Authors. On Sunday, Erick Schonfeld wrote a post entitled Is keyword search about to hit it's breaking point? On Tuesday, Stephen Arnold conducted an interview with Exalead's François Bourdoncle. Wednesday Nitin Karandikar reviewed the recent Alternative Search Engines Day, and Kaila Colbin from Search Insider wrote the intriguing "We're not a Google-killer" is the new Google-killer! Then we had a second interview when Susanne Koch of Pandia interviewed Venky Harinarayan, the co-founder of Kosmix. And finally Paul Heymann asked, "Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?" We were very fortunate to have such a distinguished group of guest writers, and I hope you'll have time to read some of their posts.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Twitter Scripts

• Delete All Direct Messages In Your Inbox -this script auto-deletes all of your old direct messages when turned on.
• Twitter Blacklist - displays a banner on twitter profiles which are listed at http://twitterblacklist.com
• TwitterIgnore - temporarily turns off tweets from a heavy poster
• Twitter Auto Update - updates twitter.com every minute
• Twitter User Classify - displays a colored bar at the top of a Twitter profile classifying the user based on Evan Prodromou's scale ranging from "twittercaster" to "twitter spammer"
• FriendFeed Twitter Client - turns FriendFeed into the place you follow Twitter
• Quotably Relinker - takes you to quotably.com instead of twitter.com when clicking on direct links to tweets to see the entire conversation
• Google Reader + Twitter - adds Google Reader posts to Twitter when clicked
• Twitter Auto Complete - shows your contacts when entering an "@" and autocompletes your contacts when only one option remains

FriendFeed Scripts

• Friend Feed by Service - lets you click to view just one service's river in your FriendFeed (like last.fm, delicious, stumbleupon, digg, etc.)
• FriendFeed Read Later - turns FriendFeed into a news reader you made by letting you mark items for later reading which you access  from a custom FriendFeed tab
• Friend Feed Remove Visited Links - completely removes links you've already visited
• Friend Feed Pagerization Fixer - automatically loads the next page when scrolling
• Friend Feed Reshare Links - adds links in FriendFeed that lets you reshare links to delicious, digg, reddit, tumblr, etc.
• Friend Feed Easy Unsubscribe - adds an “unsubscribe” link on user pages
• Friend Feed Who Are You? - display more information on user pages
• Friend Feed Show Names - shows the usernames as well as full names on the friend and public timelines
• FriendFeed Filters: Friends & Groups - lets you to filter your FriendFeed by creating groups of friends
• FriendFeed Show Domains - displays the domain name for all shared links

Digg Scripts

• Digg Done That - removes articles you've read
• Digg Filter - adds a field to the Digg homepage that lets you filter out stories you don't want to see using keyword(s) you enter
• Digg User Topics Cloud - draw a topics cloud from a user's recently dugg stories
• Digg Friends Easier - put a "diggit" next to every post under friends' submissions and shouts sections
• Always Open New Windows in Digg - does what it says - always open new windows in Digg
• digg.licio.us - adds links to save a Digg story to del.icio.us
• Add Reddit Comments To Digg - adds Reddit comments to Digg for the same article & allows you to submit comments to Reddit as well

Mixx Needs More Scripts

• Mixx Forums - adds MixxingBowl Forum and Breaking News links to navigation bar at Mixx.com

Del.icio.us/Ma.gnolia Scripts

• Google Reader + del.icio.us - adds reader posts to del.icio.us
• Google Reader + ma.gnolia - adds Google Reader's post to ma.gnolia when clicked.
• Google save to del.icio.us - places a 'Post to del.icio.us' link next to each Google search result
• Delicious Stumbles -adds a link to del.icio.us that submits all links on the page to StumbleUpon
• Ma.gnolia Condenser - fits more bookmarks on a screen for ma.gnolia.com users and makes the lock icon for private bookmarks conspicuously red
• Bookmark Every Digg - adds bookmark links next to all digg entries to the most popular bookmarking sites(del.icio.us, furl etc.)
• del.icio.us >> ma.gnolia - adds "Copy this link to Ma.gnolia" in del.icio.us

Flickr Scripts

• Flickr Cut-n-Paste to Blog - cut-and-paste flickr images to blog posts with CSS and credit links
• Flickr AllSizes+ - access all sizes for a Flickr photo, copy the code, download the image, etc.
• Flickr More Home - by default, the Flickr home page shows four images for you, four from your contacts, and four from everyone. This script expands it to 8, 16, and 8, respectively.
• Flickr - Video Hider - hides videos on Flickr photostreams and replaces them with a link to that video should you still wish to view it
• Tflickr - Twitter from Flickr. Tweet your favourites flickr images
• Flickr: Sign In and Return - return to the page you were viewing instead of Flickr home page after signing in

Facebook Scripts

• Facebook Chat Killer - gets rid of the new facebook chat feature
• ScrabuCheck -adds a floating dictionary lookup box for the game of Scrabble or Scrabulous
• Facebook Real News Feed - replace your "news feed" with real news headlines from CNN
• Facebook Large Photos - makes profile pictures large in facebook search results
• Facebook Image Download Helper - allows you to use a download manager such as DownThemAll! on Facebook image gallery pages
• Facebook Fixer - a collection of enhancements for various aspects of Facebook eg. showing bigger profile pictures, making it easier to view albums, showing people's age and sign, auto-reloading error pages, changing redirecting links to direct links
• Facebook Auto Confirm Friend Requests - accept all friend requests on Facebook

Google Reader Scripts

• Google Reader - "Mark as read" keyboard shortcuts - adds three shortcuts to mark items as read. Pressing comma, "," marks an item as read in list view and then moves to the next item. Pressing "shift-u" marks all items above the currently selected item as read. "shift-I" marks items after as read
• Google Reader autoscroll - view and mark items as read by means of a mouse wheel (and more!)
• Google Reader Preview Enhanced -adds a "Preview button" to Google Reader that allows you to view actual article in a frame
• Remove Dupes from Google Reader - removes duplicate posts from Google Reader
• Google Reader Unread Count - display actual unread count instead of "1000+" in Google Reader (only for the truly brave!)
• gReader Comments - this brings all Disqus conversations into Google Reader

Luciani's conclusion: between 1pm and 3pm PST (after lunch) or between 5pm and 7pm PST (after work) are the best times and Thursday is the best day. The worst time to post? Between 3 and 5 PM PST on the weekends - nobody cares. See the graphs below.

In the graphs below the factor measured is what AideRSS calls a PostRank of 6 or higher. AideRSS looks at all the items in an RSS feed and scores them (relative only to other items in the same feed) in terms of number of comments, number of Diggs, number of times saved to Del.icio.us and number of inbound links from blogs. The highest percentile of posts in a feed have PostRanks closest to 10.

These graphs then measure which times and days see the largest numbers of posts submitted that end up being more popular than other posts in the same feed. So the most wildly popular and discussed items among all popular items at Digg, etc. It's tracking the time that the post is submitted to the news site - not when it was necessarily posted on the blog. It's a touch obtuse and it would be nice to read a little more about the methodology employed - but the PostRank algorithm is relatively transparent and the conclusions are intuitive.

This is just one of many things we've written about using AideRSS for here at RWW. It's a simple and very powerful tool that I at least use every single day.

Note that of course people blog for more reasons than just popularity and popularity cannot be equated with popularity! If you're in a hurry it is one way to look for quality, though. :)

With no further ado, knock yourself out wrapping your mind around these graphs. I almost did; remember that times here are GMT and if you're on the West Coast of the US, I hope you just had a nice lunch and remember to subtract 7 hours from this 24 hour clock to figure out these times for yourself.

Thanks for the creative and valuable work, Jake!

For more RSS fun times, check out the other entries on the AideRSS blog.

Mixx is a service that lets users vote on top news stories. Though far, far smaller than Digg, Mixx has innovated at a pace that makes Digg look like it's standing still.

The Good News

A read/write API is quite unusual, particularly in the social news market. Digg's API, for example, only allows other sites to read data from Digg, not to post new data to the site from off-site.

Prolific API developer Matt King, co-founder of services like Unthirsty, Knitmap and the very useful Twitterlocal, told us he's intrigued. "It's a pretty sweet idea," he said. "I can see that submitting or commenting via Facebook would be interesting or building a bot that can pull stories down and do stuff with them."

Story continued below.

The Not So Good News

In addition to his interest, though, King articulated what will undoubtedly be some common concerns. "I don't like that you have to post XML data to get multiple tags - you should be able to pass tags in the URL just like the other methods," he told us. "In the end, it's another API you have to get familiar with, which sucks. I'm tired of learning new APIs - we need API standards."

John Musser of API mega-blog ProgrammableWeb says the company gets points for thinking about versioning at the API's launch, something few API providers think of. He's critical of Mixx's lack of support for data formats like JSON and OAuth too, though.

Unfortunately the Mixx API launched with just one example app built on it, the fabulous new service YackTrack. YackTrack, which we wrote about here, is a great idea but is a relatively simple application and doesn't leverage the write-capabilities of the API it's demonstrating. In our post on the pros and cons of APIs and developer platforms, API management service Mashery's Oren Michels said that two key steps to launching a good API was to have plenty of example apps at launch and to make API keys available immediately at no cost. Mixx keys are available immediately for free.

How The Future Could Look

Hopefully Mixx will be responsive to its developer community and the API will only improve. Given the nature of the company, that seems quite likely. If the service can continue to mature, we may see some pretty sophisticated Mixx functionality creeping into all kinds of different websites. Even before this API launched, Mixx has had everything Digg has and far more - except the network effect and traffic. The API will make the Mixx experience all the more fantastic for users new and old.

Someday a big destination site like Digg may look like just an early example of a far more complex social news market. Either way, competition is a very good thing. For further discussion of the Mixx API, check out the latest episode of Mixx fan-podcast SocialBlend, where fans and Mixx staff discussed the API launch.

YackTrack is a conversation tracker, automating the search for the comments that many content producers currently have to seek out on their own. After searching for a similar service that does this and not finding one, Rob decided to build his own.

Using YackTrack is simple - just enter in the URL whose comments you want to see and and click "Search for URL." YackTrack scours the net to find comments from services like Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress. Each supported service has its own separate section so you can follow the conversation that takes place on that site.

YackTrack's Web Site

There are still many things people wish that YackTrack could do, but Rob says those are coming. Specifically, his future plans include registration and saving URLs to track, RSS and email notifications, more supported services, and, based on initial user feedback, maybe a WordPress plugin as well. He also hints at something even bigger, saying "My future plans are fairly straightforward, except for one part that I would prefer not to talk about yet."

Despite these big plans, Rob seems humbled and surprised by the attention the service is receiving, especially considering the service only launched yesterday. He's worried that his server, never tested to withstand a huge traffic influx, won't be able to handle the load we send. (RWW has been known to crash startups' servers before). "This is not a large beast like FriendFeed or Twitter," he says. Maybe not yet, Rob, but I'd buy some extra servers and bandwidth just in case.

The "Super Mixxer" is a new kind of user that brings an element of competition to Mixx, something that may appeal to former top diggers who felt that they had been penalized in the past for being active contributors and participants at Digg.com. At Mixx, a user can become a "Super Mixxer" by accumulating points for posting high quality submissions of a diverse nature and by leaving quality comments, too. The user must rack up these "Karma Points" in order to qualify as a "Super Mixxer."

Once having achieved Super Mixxer status, the user will then have access to special privileges like access to the "Related Items" feature, which allows Super Mixxers to link content with previously Mixxed stories, photos, or videos, as well as the ability to tag stories as "Breaking News." In addition to these privileges, as Mixx roles out more features, Super Mixxers will gain access to other tools beyond the reach of ordinary users, too.

How Breaking News Works on Mixx

In order for stories to be marked as "Breaking," at least two Super Mixxers will have to tag it accordingly. Only a limited number of stories can be in the "Breaking News" category at any one time and they can only remain there for a limited time. If a "Breaking News" story gets enough votes, it's moved over to the "Popular" category. To highlight the "Breaking News" category, selected "Breaking News" stories are featured on the right-hand side of both the "Popular" and "News" category pages. You can also subscribe to "Breaking News" on YourMixx.

Super Mixxers can compete for an award for breaking the best stories - the new "News Hound" award will be given to the Super Mixxer who submitted the story with the most votes that day. This award will be showcased with the others, like "Most Opinionated," "Thought Leader," "Most Contentious," and more over in the Mixx Lounge.

Breaking News

Are Super Mixxers a Good Thing?

While the awards and achievements bring back an element of fun to the social news arena, one can't help but wonder if Mixx, in its infancy (it's only 6 months old), is just repeating Digg's mistakes. Compared with Digg, the Mixx userbase is small, so awarding the Super Mixxer status makes sense for now and seems to work. But what happens when Mixx grows to Digg size? Will the Super Mixxers then begin to rule Mixx the way top diggers ruled Digg, banding together in elite groups, forcing the Digg team to change the algorithm to democratize the process?

Or perhaps Mixx doesn't want to democratize the process - by handing over control to Super Mixxers, they are essentially giving a powerful few the ability to make or break Mixx by selecting quality stories for the front page. Currently, the Super Mixxers seem like a decent bunch, thoughtfully promoting stories worthy of sharing. However, by allowing Super Mixxers to tag their own submissions as "Breaking News," it's likely that some people will be tempted to use their Super status to promote their own entries, maybe even unfairly.

To weed out the unworthy, the Mixx team is hand-picking the Super Mixxers by reviewing the comments, submissions, and participation of potential Super Mixxers before awarding them the SM badge. Again, this works for now, but will become overwhelming as the Mixx user base grows.

If allowing the most active users of the service to have the most power, then why does Mixx think this will work for them, when it didn't work for Digg? What will prevent Super Mixxers from forming voting groups or getting paid off to submit stories. Just because a user behaved for a month to achieve Super Mixxer status, doesn't mean they won't turn further down the line and begin using that power for their own purposes later on. Will Mixx then begin revoking Super Mixxer badges? That has the potential to cause just as much outrage as the algorithmic changes to Digg, if not more so, since an algorithm change is a more amorphous and vague, whereas yanking a badge away is a more obvious, direct punishment.

It seems that Mixx is hedging their bets on their ability to "choose wisely" when it comes to selecting their top Mixxers. However, since Super Mixxers don't have the ability to "bury" stories, maybe Mixx will be able to escape the backlash that comes when people feel that a select few have too much power.

If general or specific are two ways to categorize social news sites, let's look at these two categories in terms of:

• Quality of news
• Speed of news
• Detail of news
• Community feel

Quality of news

In theory, big social news sites have the advantage of using large groups of people and correspondingly strong algorithms to discover and vet high quality content on any topic. In reality, though, this effect is often mitigated by the imperative to limit coverage to a single story concerning each news event. The big sites usually see the first good story on a topic promoted to the front page and subsequent quality coverage is left in the dust. The fact that something happened at all becomes much more important than deliberation over which coverage of that event is most worth reading.

The small niche social news sites don't suffer from this dilemma but depending on the breadth of your social network or niche userbase, important news may simply go unnoticed and not be covered at all. That's a risk you run on these kinds of sites, but on the other hand the wealth of resources that your friends can share is often much richer. Small social news sites don't care about repeat coverage of common events and don't revert to a "lowest common denominator" method of determining what's important.

From the outside niche sites may turn up a lot of content that doesn't look important at all, but the closer you are to a topic - the more important the details become.

If you can find a niche site for your niche, or an active set of like-minded contributers as contacts on a site like FriendFeed - then the quality of news will be vastly superior. Otherwise, and to supplement those small social news experiences, the big sites work well enough.

It's notable that Digg has been trying to create those kinds of small experiences within the big site, but I don't think it's worked very well so far. The Digg user experience is just not built for small communities of interest.

On the small social news side, two things worth checking out are FriendFeed's fantastically executed friend recommendation feature (it just goes on and on with suggestions) and social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia's seemless implementation of groups. Both are great examples of how to nail a small social news feature.

Speed of News

Nobody likes being the last to know about important news, so speed is an important metric. Sometimes, very rarely, the big general interest sites see something burn up the charts and hit the front page in less than an hour after submission. Far more common, at least at Digg, is for news to take 6 to 24 hours to get to the most visible place on the site. Big social news sites are so reliant on explicit user validation of news as important, and require that this goes on in the context of a terrible signal to noise ratio, that these are not the sites to go to for early news if being early is important to you.

Traditional mainstream news sites beat big social news sites on stories all day long, and if our new web can't beat the old-school then I don't know what it's good for. Joking aside, there are many things more important than being fast, but it is important in a news source.

All those criticisms being as they are, check out the Propeller Tracker on the right hand side of that site for a good example of a big site tackling the speed problem.

Small social news sites are much faster at unearthing news, if someone happens to catch that news at all early in the news cycle. Different sites handle this in different ways, though.

FriendFeed gives you a firehose and doesn't privilege the important stuff over everything else. The new Tumblr looks like it is going to highlight content as soon as a handful of people have linked to it, that's great and something I'll bet other sites will start doing soon. Sphinnn, the online marketing version of Digg, falls somewhere in between. Less populated voting sites have a lower threshold for popularity but less energy driving good news forward fast, too.

Detail of news

Big sites ought to have rich discussions in comments and offer greater detail on the news, but they rarely do. Slashdot and Propeller might be the exceptions so far. How's discussion over at Newsvine? I don't know, perhaps someone can let us know in comments.

For the most part though, mainstream audiences are still often not used to, don't feel compelled to or are unable to leave high-quality comments on social news stories. That's where the richness in detail comes from in the current model. How hard would it be to pull in related content on these news topics from sites like Del.icio.us and Twitter? Not very hard. That would be cool.

Niche social news sites lose out on some detail because of the smaller sample set of contributors, but they are clearly better for detail overall. There are more and more finely grained links discoverable on topics of interest to you in a niche site that suits your needs. Like the question of quality, detail is a criteria that niche sites clearly win on if a healthy niche site is appropriate or available for you at all.

Community feel

I prefer to spend my time in the company of people who have the same interests and who already agree with me about things that are important. I'm just kidding about that.

That's the trade-off you often make when choosing to spend your time on a niche social news site. You trade opportunities to make new and diverse social connections for the opportunity to develop a closer connection to a smaller, more homogeneous group of news lovers. Both have their place, I wouldn't want one and not the other in my life.

Final Thoughts

The complimentary nature of community on big and little social news sites is a good snapshot of what's probably true in all of the above questions - getting the best of both worlds is ideal.

I find myself spending about 75% of my news consumption time in niche social news sites (Twitter and Ma.gnolia mostly) and 25% in big social news sites. I wish I had more time for both. I intend to spend some more time on FriendFeed and I'm jealous every time I see a good Tumblr blog.

We've been having some slow times at Digg lately, so I'm interested in checking out Mixx.

What does all this mean? I think it means that big social news sites are at risk of losing substantial amounts of user engagement once users discover that more targeted news environments are available to them. Big sites will probably always be big, but the social news landscape is quickly growing richer day by day.