Mixwit Remembered

For all those who want to take a trip back down memory lane with us, here are a few tokens of Mixwit history. First, a wonderful demo video created by Molly McDonald over at demogirl.com:

We launched just a week previous so Mixwit was a bit rough around the edges when Molly’s screencast was taken, but despite my embarrassment over that little spinny clock, it still captures the essence of Mixwit

In a less than nine months 90,194 mixtapes were created and at our peak millions of people were seeing your mixtapes every month on our site and throughout the web via our widgets.

From our launch to death the press was also very kind to us. We were covered by techcrunch (not once, not twice, but three times), webware (twice), cnet, mashable, the la times, techdirt, paidcontent, wired, and 100s of other smaller blogs and publications that would take me days to list. We even got our 15 minutes of fame in France with a spot on a popular morning show.

The best part of running Mixwit though was all of wonderful individual comments, tweets, videos, and feedback emails. Here are a few of my personal favorites:

I’m telling you, it’s spreading like a disease here at work. A bunch of us have been rendered ineffective this week and are instead dedicated to the newly formed “Mix Tape Club.”

I love the site. It has brought my brother and I closer together though we are over 1,000 miles away. Thank you. Mixwit Inc.

Oh my god. It’s a good thing I don’t really have anything I need to get done today cuz I will probably spend the rest of the day playing with this. Amazing!

Although the Mixwit site is dead, it partly lives on through an open source project we created based on the the Mixwit mixtape widget called mixwidget.org.

Thanks everyone for making Mixwit so great! Keep an eye on our new startup cloud.tv. We’ll be making some exciting announcements over the next few months!

happy endings…

Mixwit is dead, but the spirit of mixtapes lives on through the open source community. We just completed mixwidget.org – a new open-source mixtape project based on our former Mixwit mixtape.

Thanks again for all of your support. You can find us working hard on our new project:

cloud.tv

 

 

ttfn!

We’ll Meet Again…

As we say our goodbyes, we sign off with a final message of hope and inspiration. We’ll be back in 2009 with a new company and new plan.

Thanks again to everyone for a fantastic year!  It has been a blast!

-Mixwit

Deadpool update & possible OpenTape option

We’re delaying turning off profiles until Dec 27th, primarily due to hosting issues. For some odd reason we can’t do an update that will allow us to notify our non-blog-finding users of our pending closure. The site will still go dark by the 31st.

Mike and I have been talking about donating the source code to the OpenTape project. We’ll email users info on where they’ll be able to find their stuff before the end of the year.

All good things…

We regret to announce that Mixwit will cease to exist at the end of the year. The website and profiles will be turned off around Dec 21st Dec 27th and all embedded widgets will stop playing before the end of December.

We’ve put a year of work into Mixwit so this choice wasn’t taken lightly. I won’t go into the details of our situation but state simply that we boldly marched into in a position best described as “between rock and a hard place.” We’re very grateful to be have been part of the mixtape revival of ‘08 and are satisfied to be able to to bow out while things are still good.

You guys are all amazing. It’s clear that all of you put a ton of time and effort into your mixes. For me personally, I was looking forward to all of the designs people created for their tapes. There was a lot of basic tapes and many lovely photos, but the designs and artwork – WOW!

We’re very sorry that this has to end. We’re going to try to figure out some way to archive the artwork and playlists, if for nothing at least historic value. As for now, everything needs to be shut down by the end of the year just to make sure we’ve got a clean start for 2009.

We’ll return early next year with a new company and new toys. Until then, enjoy the holidays and please take good care of yourselves, your families, and your friends =)

Teaming Up with Tag Strategic

Today we’re happy to announce Mixwit has formed a consulting relationship with TAG Strategic, a global digital media and entertainment advisory firm with offices in Los Angeles, Seattle and London.

The purpose of this engagement is clear – in order for Mixwit to fulfill our potential we need an experienced team to help us forge the partnerships that will form the backbone of our service.  In the coming months, TAG’s expertise and relationships with senior management at the top media companies in the world will be essential in helping us form these partnerships.

Lead by Ted Cohen, TAG Strategic provides strategy, guidance, market intelligence, business modeling and business development services to leaders and select emerging leaders in the digital media space.
A 30-year industry veteran, Ted Cohen has served as Chairman of the Mobile Entertainment Forum Americas board, and currently chairs MidemNet, the international music/technology conference convened in Cannes each year. Ted also serves on the NARAS (Grammy) Los Angeles chapter Board of Governors and the boards for iMeem and En2Go. Ted was formerly Senior VP of Digital Music for EMI Music and also held senior management roles at Warner and Phillips.

Managing TAG’s Los Angeles office is Brooke Michael, formerly of Sony/BMG, and recent graduate from USC Business School. TAG’s London office is headed by Khalid Amin former head of new business for London Calling. TAG’s Seattle office is managed by Colleen Andersen, formerly of Microsoft, Sony, Warner and EMI and co-founder of EPO (an online legal service) and iBloks Inc.

Additional thanks goes out to Michael Downing for connecting us with TAG. Michael’s introduction was essential to making this relationship happen.

My Services – share your social and media profiles

We’ve just added My Services, a new way for Mixwit users to find and discover each other, as well as their favorite media, on other popular online services.

If you’re signed-in to the Mixwit website, click on this link to get started:

• http://mixwit.com/settings/myservices

From here you can select from several social and media services including Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, iMeem, Last.fm, and YouTube. Follow the instructions to add a link to your public profile on any of these service. We’ve also included a couple of general icons to allow you to add your website or blog.

There’s about two dozen service icons so far, based on what’s most popular to our users, but we can do more. Feel free to make a request for your service(s) in the comments below, or send us feedback.

This is a first small step towards our goal of helping users bring together their disconnected services. We’ll have more to announce on that next week…