Packaging the News as Tweets
McLean Start-Up Expands to Try to Harness Twitter's Popularity
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Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Chris McGill, founder of the McLean-based Web start-up Mixx, isn't much of a fan of Twitter, but his company's latest venture is banking on the microblogging site's widespread appeal.
Mixx is a sort of online news service where users vote on the day's most interesting stories. Those stories come mostly from Web sites such as CNN.com. Starting Wednesday, however, Mixx will offer a new service that combs through Twitter postings, as well.
In a demonstration earlier this week, McGill pitched the service, called TweetMixx, as a way to keep up with online topics without having to read all the more mundane stuff people feel like typing and sharing in bursts of 140 characters or less.
The site's software is clever enough to avoid repeating Twitter posts; if 500 people post a Tweet to the same online news story, TweetMixx will make sure your account posts the story only once. If a Twitter user posts a link to a news story that TweetMixx thinks you'll find interesting, the service also pulls in the article's headline and a leading sentence or two from the article.
McGill, a former Yahoo News and USA Today executive, started Mixx two years ago in part because he was having a tough time sorting through online news about Alzheimer's disease, an ailment that runs in his family. TweetMixx, he said, is an extension of that original mission: to better connect people with the information they seek.
"I don't care if you're having a cup of coffee or if your big toe hurts," said McGill, joking about the trivial nature of the average Twitter posting.
Mixx, which employs just nine people including McGill, gets more than 4 million online visitors a month. It is not the best known player in "social news"; the more famous and more tech-news-focused site Digg gets about 35 million visitors a month by comparison.
Mixx hopes to eventually make a profit by attracting Web advertisers. For now, the company is living off of investment capital. Considering the effect the economic collapse has had on many small start-ups, McGill argues that its survival is an accomplishment unto itself.
"If you're still standing now, like Mixx, you're coming out the other side of the storm," McGill said. "That doesn't mean it's smooth sailing, but you made it through the very dark period."
