Posts Tagged mixin

mixin – make a proposition

September 23, 2008 at 7:26 am · Filed under feature ·Tagged , ,

mixin let you share your agenda with your friends in a real simple way. Just specify what you are going to do naturally and let your friend get in touch with you to do things together more often.

But sometimes, you want to do something with your friends, but you don’t know precisely where and when. For that purpose there is a type of activity called a proposition. The syntax to create a proposition is the same as the one to create a plan with one exception. You need to add a question mark at the end of your post to create a proposition. The proposition allows you to specify multiple choices.

For example, you want to lunch with friends but don’t know when and where, just enter the choices separated by semicolon.

Example

Once a proposition is created you can decide if you want to leave the different choices (what, where of when) open or not. Just click on the links next to the choices to open or close them. By default the choices are open.

If you want to invite people to discuss this proposition, click the “invite people to this event” button. You can either select particular friends on the service or invite new friends by entering their email addresses separated by commas.

When your friends receive an email there is link to the detail page. On this page, your friends can  vote or make suggestions if you left the choices opened. And each time something is happening on this proposition (vote, suggestion) or posted to the proposition (comment, media) the users invited to the proposition are notified via their preferred communication channel.

And once the votes are over, the person who created it can transform the proposition into a plan. The administrator of the activity needs to make some of the choices final.

And make it final

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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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mixin – what are your friends doing this week?

July 18, 2008 at 9:08 am · Filed under help ·Tagged , , , ,

What is mixin
mixin is a social agenda to share, discuss and organize activities with your friends. mixin gives an overview of what could happen in the near future and creates opportunities to get together more often. 

Why mixin
mixin filters and complements the current vision that you have through various communication channels including micro-blogging on what our friends are doing right now or what they did. mixin focuses on the future in order to create opportunities of activities in the real world. Each user has its agenda, which is an aggregation of what their friends are planning, proposing to do, where they’ll be or when they might be available. mixin offers a social peripheral vision trough micro-events over the week.  

Share your micro-agenda
You can add activities in 2 clicks from your timeline on the website but can also publish via IM, SMS, Email or your actual calendar application. In addition to this, mixin parses your Twitter messages and automatically populates your agenda when activities are identified. mixin helps people to identify opportunities by filtering information they already publish. 

Structure your data
mixin users can add other popular services they might use. mixin will for example automatically link Flickr pictures or Qik videos to an activity depending on the media date. mixin structures the flow of information by activities and by group as several users can join an activity. 

What’s next
We want to bring mixin to people whatever the channels they are using. We built a first version of our API so that we will be able to connect to other services and let people build their own vision of how mixin should be. Don’t hesitate if you have any idea!

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