Archive for August, 2008

Find and import friends from your online address book

August 25, 2008 at 6:03 pm · Filed under feature ·Tagged

We had many users saying us that they feel alone on mixin! With the new friend finder and importer, you can find and invite friends from most popular webmails, including Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo mail, MSN, AOL, Mac, LinkedIn and so on.

Give it a try, go to the Find and invite friends page and enter your address book username and password. At the fist step, you can send friend requests to existing mixin users and at the second step you can invite your other contacts to mixin.

Last but not least, we plan to add a Facebook friends importer soon, so stay tuned!

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Add activities from your online calendar into mixin automatically

August 11, 2008 at 7:23 pm · Filed under feature ·Tagged , , , ,

You knew that you can publish to mixin by SMS, twitter, email and IM. You can now subscribe to your online calendar such as GCalendar, Upcoming, fbCal or any online ICalendar and add activities from it into mixin automatically.

Here is a short tutorial on how to do it. First, get your external calendar url and copy it into the input field as shown below. If you use GCalendar, we recommend you to create a new calendar, you can get the GCalendar url in the calendar settings page as shown here:

After clicking on the subscribe button we copy all calendar events to mixin. If you set a privacy on your external calendar all the events from this calendar will have the selected privacy when the are copied.

We copy and update the events from your calendars to mixin every hours. For each event copied from your calendar, we do this process:

  • We try to match the mixin activities type with your event as follow:
    • If there is a location specified, a date and no what (title for the event) we create a location
    • If there are multiple locations (i.e. using the syntax with the ; “1 Baker Street; Home”) or multiple whats (i.e. using the syntax “Watching a movie; Playing Wii” in the event title) or the event title ends up with a “?”, we create a proposition
    • If there is a date and the title contains “free” or “available” (we accept an optional location), or if the title and location are empty we create an availability
    • Else we create a plan
  • If there are any attendees in your event, we will try to find registered user by email on mixin. If we find a registered user, we will show him as invited in mixin. If the attendee is not a registered user, we will create a guest account for him in mixin, we do not send any emails. If he joins mixin later, this activity will be part of his agenda.

If your event has been updated in your calendar we will synchronize the changes in mixin unless you edit the event in mixin. In that case, we break the synchronization link. You can always invite attendees and add medias in mixin, this will not break the link but theses changes won’t be synchronized back to your calendar.

Limitations & restrictions

  • If you invite more attendees from your calendar they won’t be updated in mixin if the event has already been copied to mixin
  • If your event is deleted in your calendar, it won’t be deleted in mixin
  • Whoever is the event owner in your calendar, you will be the activity owner in mixin
  • For the moment you cannot subscribe to your ICal or Outlook calendar BUT you can still create activities from these clients simply by adding mixin@mixin.com as a guest to the event
  • There are no way to create wishes from your external calendar
  • We do not copy your events which are older than 1 year

Coming soon: a better GCalendar integration.

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Badges for your websites

August 6, 2008 at 10:06 pm · Filed under help ·Tagged

We want to open mixin to any output and any input channels and we have developed badges you can add on your website or blog. These badges are fully configurable and they let you display your public timeline and activities.

Go to your Integration page in your settings and select one of the four templates and copy and paste the code straight into your blog/site template. It should use the styles from your blog stylesheets and hopefully should look alright without any changes.

If you want to customize its content or look, here are the different options:

  • “show timeline”: display or hide the timeline at the top of you badge
  • “show details”: display or hide the number of attendees for each actvities
  • “custom design”: gives you a full control over the different colors you would want to display

Here are a few samples of what it looks like:
display your timeline on your blog

  • the smallest, showing only a snapshot of your public timeline from now and the next six days, along with your current active wishes.
  • the “overview” template displays 3 of your upcoming activities, 3 of your past activities and 3 of your wishes.

    • the “week” template displays the current week starting today as its name suggest

      • the “upcoming” template displays a limited number of upcoming activities

        For the laziest among us we also added the Wildfire button from gigya.com, easing the publication of the badge in popular blog platforms and also many services (such as Blogger, WordPress, Facebook, iGoogle, Netvibes and many more).

        If you add activities to mixin from email, sms, IM, twitter, gCal… your calendars or simply the website the badge will show these updates.

        Please send us your feedback about this feature. If you need any help or if you struggle with the badge integration let us know. We welcome all your suggestions.

        More integration features like this will apear in the near future, stay tuned.

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        mixin interview on culturepod

        August 2, 2008 at 8:37 am · Filed under press, team

        Thierry Weber from culturepod just published an interview we did together recently. If you’re curious to see our faces but more interestingly to have an additional explanation of the service, a few words on our vision, our future and our current financial need have a look at it:

        Here is another version in French and if you’re at ease with beaudelaire’s language here is a great review of mixin by Ouriel (Techcrunch France). Thanks guys.

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