Mixwit.Blog

Oh man, we’re so happy to get this out. With over 1000 pages of mixtapes and almost 20,000 mixtapes made, our “just get it out and we’ll get back to it” page-based navigation never stood a chance.

Mike has completed a bunch of standard navigation features over the past few days that we’ve been sorely missing. The biggest addition is the ability to search for users, mix titles, artist names, and song titles.

For me, the search feature was immediately satisfying: within 5 minutes I had found almost a dozen new mixtapes to add to my favorites.

We’ve also added in a few other basic navigation features including page titles and breadcrumbs. The website is starting to work like a real site!

(image by Exploding Dog, thnx!)

We really want to give a huge shout-out and thank you to the WordPress team for busting their patooties and getting this out. Even Mixwit uses WordPress, so now we can finally post mixtapes ourselves! Enjoy!

[Quick note: we've had tons of requests for embedding mixtapes into the sidebar. We're working on it, but it will be a couple of weeks before it'll be finished. I guess it's a bit more complicated...]

We’re really excited to launch our new “WidgetFlow” menu for mixtapes. We’ve been working on this feature for over a month, so we’re omg-stoked that it’s finally available.

It’s best to think of this as sort of a mutant blend between old school cassettes and an iPod for your website. With the click of a button, your viewer can now find and play your new mixes and favorite mixes (up to 20 of each). The coolest part is this happens right in the widget - your viewer never leaves the page.

This is a first release, so there’s naturally going to be some bugs. We’ll be working on fixes all week, so please send us feedback if you run into any problems. Most bugs can be solved simply by refreshing the page.

For the Flash/tech fans, we essentially adopted an open-source Papervision3D-based menu by John Dyer called FlickrFlow and made a few modifications. Much thnx to John, Papervision, and the Flash community for continuing to produce and share such amazing resources.

As a side-note: the Mixwit site is going to go through a bunch of organization updates over the next few weeks. It’s difficult to discover mixtapes in the current version, so we’ll be rolling out search features right away. We’re also overhauling our URL and links for users and mixtapes and making those more humane. There’s a few more (huge) changes coming as well, but we can’t say what *those* are yet.

We’ve added favorites to let users easily find the stuff they like. It’s a good start, but it might be confusing since it’s not fully implemented as… say YouTube favorites.

Anyone will be able to see your favorites just like they can see your mixes. But you’ll have to be signed-in to add / remove favorites. This isn’t our grand conspiracy to hook-in users; it just takes more time to make this work a) without refreshing the page and b) when you’re not signed in. With this iteration, you can favorite a mix without interrupting the music. And with over 700 pages of live mixtapes, something useful was required *ASAP*

On a side note, many people have asked about ratings and most popular type features. Our current goals flow down a slightly different path for now, so we’re going to be rolling out features based on favorites & fan/follow. There’s a few more coming soon that we’re pretty excited about… like, omg-level (to us). Hopefully you’ll like ‘em too.

We were able to talk with WordPress this week about the embed problems everyone is having, and they offered us a few solutions that we thought we could share.

With the release of v2.5, WordPress has a new shortcuts program. We need a little time to implement this process. Once we get our side complete, it will also take WP a little bit of work on their end. I would expect that they’re trying to help a ton of services at the moment, so it may be a few days.

They also mentioned that they’re working with Gigya on a Flash embed solution, which would help a ton of services all at once. If Gigya’s embed is working before our shortcut is completed, we’ll make sure you can use it.

In the meantime, Vodpod has a Firefox extension to auto-post Flash content to your blog. The instructions say it’s for video, but it’s Flash video and may be just as easy to forward a Flash mixtape…

Update: We are now live on wordpress.com! We still need to do some integration on our side, but if you can’t wait, just email support [-at-] mixwit dot com, and we’ll let you know to do it.

In the chaos that followed our public beta launch, demo days, viral press, bug fixes, and rounds of interviews in the valley… we forgot that we could finally reveal we’re a YC start-up.

For those who aren’t familiar, Y Combinator is an advisory pre-seed project started by Paul Graham that funds and supports start-ups. YC does two sessions per year: summer in Boston and winter in Silicon Valley.

Our session was the largest to date with 21 start-ups. For the past 3 months we met once a week for a huge dinner and to take part in a presentation. The presenters offered the range of experience we’ll be facing, starting with previous YC start-ups and moving up into (very cool) industry leaders.

In the meantime, we worked. Non-stop. Every day. For 2 & 1/2 months build build build. The attitude was release early, update often. We drank the kool-aid. And two weeks ago we were able to present to over 100 investors in the valley and say “yeah, we make mixtapes!”

Crazy.

So, now that we’re at the end of our YC session, I wanted to turn around and offer whatever advise I could to the applicants who are waiting to hear if they’ve been accepted to Summer ‘08 YC in Boston.

To all applicants:

Welcome to the fold. Sorry, no hoodies or white sneakers, but please drink the kool-aid.

Paul Graham is cool. He’s very smart and the core of YC, but you’ll quickly discover he’s not everything. He didn’t invent Apple. He didn’t invent the flux capacitor. What he is really good at is intense positive support, quick decision-making, and the ability to accurately point you towards your next step.

The biggest benefit was meeting and working with other YC start-ups. Making friends. Not just our batch, but other start-ups too.

To the accepted:

Don’t show up a few minutes early for dinners: arrive an *hour before dinner*. It’s quieter, there’s yummy snacks, you’ll get a good seat, and there’s always other start-ups hanging out.

Other advise: Start now. Work hard, nonstop. Take a quick break if you’re burnt out, but expect to put aside “life” as much as possible for a few months. Build your product. Get it out to people. Test test test, debug. Talk to other start-ups. Ask questions. Be excited, be motivated, but *please* don’t be arrogant

Embrace your YC session as a fun life experience and you’ll find how much your idea of “life” can really change. Follow these simple steps and at the end you’ll know you’re *one of us*.

To the rejected:

Rejection sucks. Yup. Particularly if you’re a huge YC fanboy/fangirl.

If there’s anything I can share, it’s this: you can still do it, you can be a start-up. Start now. Work hard, nonstop. Take a quick break if you’re burnt out, but put aside “life” as much as possible for a few months. Build your product. Get it out to people. Test test test, debug. Talk to other start-ups. Ask questions. Be excited, be motivated, but *please* don’t be arrogant

Embrace your start-up as a fun life experience and you’ll find how much your idea of “life” can really change. Follow these simple steps and within the same amount of time you’ll realize you’re *one of us*. (You just didn’t need the training wheels.)

So, we had a little fun with April Fool’s Day and changed the gears to hypno-spirals. A few people were pretty shocked about the change and thought it might be permanent.

Fear not, the regular gears are back. If you play the widget, you’ll see them.

There is one thing we should mention. If you published your mixtape with the hypno-gears, your thumbnail will have hypno-gears, but they won’t appear in your actual mixtape. Now, if you go back to the editor and publish your mixtape again, your new thumbnail will have regular gears.

Make sense?

We really enjoyed the hypno-gears, so we might make them an option in the future. Hrmmm…..

We were going to announce that we rolled out new tapeskins last night, but I woke this morning to find that y’all had found them already. There’s 20 more, which doubles what we had previously.

We also added the ability for users to delete mixes from Mixwit and Facebook. Note that “delete” means that tape is deleted everywhere: Mixwit, Facebook, blog, all of it. We’ll try to work out more location-specific in the future. In the meantime, if you need to recover your mix just drop us a line.

Ciao!

We’ve rolled out a bunch of new features this week. The biggest addition is Skreemr music search. Skreemr approaches music search a little differently, by prioritizing tracks based on link quality. We’ve had really good results with Seeqpod, but Mixwit is dedicated to working with many different media sources from the net.

You’ll probably also notice some changes in the pop-up controls. We’ve added a scrubber for… uhm… scrubbing through the current track. There’s also a volume control for everyone who was asking for it.

Finally, we’ve added a few new link-outs in the controls:

• view my mixes - takes you to the mixtape creators page of mixtapes
• make a mix - takes people to the mixmaker
• mixwit logo - yeah, well… links to our homepage

Mike’s still working really hard on bug fixes and responding to everyone’s emails. Thank you to everyone who’s sent in emails of love and enthusiasm, you’ve been a huge energy boost! ^_^

You’ll find you have a few options on how to manage your cassette’s text labels when using the Mixmaker.

Tool Menu

Text Style allows you to manipulate:

• font color and size ( 9pt - 36pt )
• justification (left, center, and right)
• the background label color and transparency (alpha)

Description allows you to enter the title and creator info which are displayed when your cassette is first shown. Note: as soon as the cassette starts playing, title and creator are replaced by the song title and artist name.

Direct Editing

There’s a couple of less-obvious features for editing your text labels directly on the cassette. Click once and you’ll highlight the label. If highlighted, you can start to drag the label around. At the same time, you can choose to double-click the label, which will enable you to edit the text.

The text labels are far from complete. We’ve got several ideas on what needs to be improved, as well as additional features. But hopefully, you’ve got enough to work with for now. Have fun!