Welcome to a new social networking experience and a reliable Ning-Importer
Big news has rocked the world of micro social networks. Ning has cut large parts of its staff as well as giving many networks a difficult choice: pay or move away. We believe Ning has its reasons for making this step and nobody should take it personally. Of course this doesn’t help the networks that will become homeless. Many social network creators and bloggers have started looking for (sometimes strange) alternatives. That is where mixxt comes in.
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
- Custom welcome emails, powerful newsletter system
- Highly customizable activity feeds
- Control the read and write access for every module individually. Imagine letting all members blog, but only the creator can upload files
- Decide who can access your network, how the members can join and how search engines can access your site
Powerful sub-groups
- Create sub-groups with their own forums and images
- Control who can join groups and how
- Create closed or open segments for your users by creating controlled groups
- Allow your members to mail all other members of the group, this way you can have handy mailing lists
Full Collaboration features, not only for educational and work-related use-cases
- Wikis, collaborative image albums, powerful document-sharing
- Add images to any text (incl. forum posts, content pages, wiki pages, news or blog posts etc.)
- Attach files to any content (incl. forum posts, content pages, wiki pages, news or blog posts etc.)
- Very powerful event-management (RSVP, automatic waiting lists, attendee exports), ideal for networks focussing on an event (e.g. BarCamps and others) or a series of events
- CMS, news system, blogs (for users or only for admins) …
Advanced customization
- Customize your main menu and start page
- Create your own design with the layout manager
- Change any element of your community with CSS
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!
A real Ning-Import and the migration survey
The wild search for alternatives to Ning is keeping many social network creators more than busy, especially in the educational sector. Migrating your social network from Ning is a daunting task. Several services have rushed to offer you a “Ning-Importer”, which in many cases just sends out invitation messages. If it does some kind of import, it will probably scramble non-English characters. You also have to check if profile questions are imported properly, in most cases they are not. Multiple choice profile questions? Not so easy, either. At least until now.
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:
- Upload the memberdata.csv file
- Review the memberlist that is going to be imported (user data view of all records)
- Review the profile questions, set question types
- Automatically detect multiple choice answer options (you must select “multiple choice” for the detection to work)
- Add further questions and multiple choice answers on-the-fly
- Sort, rearrange and rename the profile questions
- Automatically join the imported members into your network
- Imported members automatically receive an activation email with a direct link to the activation system
- Soon: custom messages for the activation emails
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.
@mixxt looks great on Twitter
In addition to our help pages* and direct support via email, the mixxt team is using (and loving) the microblogging service Twitter to answer questions and requests from the mixxt universe. Twitter allows us to communicate with our audience and react very quickly, almost in real time.
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.
Global friendships in mixxt Communities
Some of our users have been waiting for this announcement for months: We will be adding “global friendships” to your communities! When joining a network, users will automatically become friends with all members they added as friends in other networks before. By implementing this feature, the flood of friendship requests and confirmations going along with joining a new network will be reduced to a minimum.
The desire for these global friendships mainly arose from barcampers and webworkers, who actively participate in many of our networks. But since the majority of our users hold a membership in only one network, we have postponed this topic several times.
BarCamp Power Users
One of our goals is to keep mixxt with it’s multiple features as simple as possible to use, even for non-techie users. On the one hand, both the administrator and the members of a single (non-barcamp) community would most probably not catch the importance of “global friendships”. For them, they appear to be just needless. On the other hand, feedback and wishes from the BarCamp scene are very important to us, we see ourselves and our software as part of this scene and have grown with it. That’s why we were looking for a solution which satisfies our power users, but is not too complex to build or to use.
Our “Global Friendship” Solution
After discussing different scenarios, we have decided to go for a system which we can implement with reasonable effort and that will surely make our barcampers happy: Read more »
Update: Invitations, Message Centre & Contact Form
Last weekend, we added a few features to our community kit. mixxt now comes along with enhanced invitation and message centre settings as well as a new contact form to get in touch with the community’s founder directly.
Invitations
To win new members for a community, the founder – and, depending on privacy settings, other members – may send invitations to the email addresses or mixxt-IDs of the desired persons. Since the latest update, mixxt additionally provides a summary of all previously sent and accepted invitations:
More harmony for our users
Last night we launched another update. Besides some bugfixes we added some nice features to our version called “harmony”.
Mulit Image Uploader
With our new multi image uploader, you can now upload several images to your photo albums at the same time. That’s comfortable if you for example took a bunch of great photos at an event and want to share them with your network without much effort.
Lifestream via RSS
All the network news and activities can now comfortably be subscribed via RSS. You may now easily integrate the stream into your daily Online-reading and remain up to date about what’s going on in your community. In addition, you might be glad to hear that we are working on the user activities lifestream as well and will launch this feature soon.
Invitation mails
Many users asked to improve the handling of the network invitation mails. We have taken this to heart: After sending these invitations to potential new members of your community an invitation screen will be prompted to show a summary of the recipients and the validity of the entered mixxt IDs.
New notification
We have also worked on the notification mails and made them a bit more fancy. The harmony of mixxt can now be directly transfered from your networks into your mailboxes :)
And again: Your feedback is welcome! Your desires and suggestions help us to make mixxt even better. Thank you!
mixxt brings harmony
This week, mixxt has brought harmony to all our users, partners and friends by releasing a new update! Based on a proposal of our Country Manager Turkey, Şekip Can Gökalp, version 0.14 of our Social Network kit now bears the name “harmony”.
What’s new?
In order to fulfil the desires of our users we implemented the option to stay “logged in” on our system for 14 days. We just wanted to make our users feel even more comfortable with handling mixxt and with managing their user profiles. Another news: Users of nickname networks may now change their own nicknames on their profile page. Of course, there is no such option in real name networks.
Lifestream
We continued to optimise our lifestream: Network admins may now add blog posts to appear in the stream. Via the menu builder, they can also put the lifestream on a separate tab in the menu bar.
Design
We also got creative on the themes and added six new ones to our repertoire! They let you arrange and design your networks in the basic way or even give them a personal touch by individually configuring their appearance.
Help and navigation
Everyone who knows the fairytale of Hansel and Gretel must have heard of the breadcrumbs story. These little crumbs provide orientation and indicate the correct path. In our forum module, we have now implemented the so called “breadcrumb navigation“. On the one hand, it lets you keep track of your location in the forum, on the other hand it leads you through the forum navigation by linking to the superordinate levels.
In addition, we improved various help texts and added more internal linking to facilitate navigation and operation in the Social Networks for both admins and network members.
And now: Experience a harmonious Social Networking with mixxt!
