By Allison Leigh

Following up on the Reddit announcement that they were opening up their platform to third parties, Mixx has announced that they are enabling third parties to have their own branded “Mixx” site.  If you are not familiar with the company, Mixx is a Digg competitor who gained a significant growth in market share when their Mixx button was placed throughout the CNN network.  They offer quite a few differentiating factors such as:

• Sub categorization placement for submissions, you can place your articles, photo or video into 8 categories on the site.
• Multiple levels for stories, this means that your submission is not lost quite as easily as on Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon.
• A clean and easy to navigate interface that is customized to your interests.  When you sign in, your homepage has the upcoming and popular stories from the categories you initially expressed interest in.  So when I sign in, I automatically see all most popular technology stories posted.

And with their most recent announcement, third parties can now set up their own branded “Mixx” sites.  Most likely the best way to set these up would be to take a particular vertical and focus on it.  So a technology blog or forum should created a technology specific news aggregation community.  It may appear that Mixx is simply responding to the announcement of Reddit from last week, however they say that this is not the case.  Instead they say that this move was previously planned and is an extension of their Mixx Groups initiative.  Whether that is the case or not, I have always preferred Mixx to Reddit or Digg, so I think this was a good move for them strategically since it is an additional differentiating factor for those wanting to migrate from Digg.  (BTW, the screenshot in this post is an example of a branded Mixx community).