Yeah! Woo!

FanMix (and TechStars) are throwing a big ol’ party at South By Southwest. If you’re planning on attending the conference this year, come hang out with us and 20+ other great TechStars teams.

TechStars Invades SXSW 2012 on Friday, March 9 at the Cedar Street Courtyard from 8pm to 2am. Grab a ticket (while you can).

Schwag. Food. Company logos projected everywhere. Don’t miss out on this startup partypocalypse!

FanMix now unifies all your social contacts (Twitter followers, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections) into one master list. You can click the “conversations” link on the right end of each contact to browse all the conversations you’ve had with that person in the past.

You can sort your contact list four ways:

“Most recent” will show the contacts you’ve interacted with most recently.

“Network size” will show your contacts with the largest networks of their own.

“Name” will show your contacts alphabetically.

“Conversations” will show the contacts you’ve interacted with the most at the top.

Next, we’ll integrate the contact list with FanMix’s compose feature, allowing you to easily specify recipients from your contact list when you compose a new broadcast or reply to a conversation thread. Cool right?

Our team is really getting into the swing. We are now pushing out major updates to FanMix every Wednesday. Here are our most recent improvements:

Speed overhaul

Beta users are telling us they love the service, but hate the 2-4 minute delay in seeing their Twitter and Facebook conversations appear. This week, we managed to reduce that delay to less than one minute (often much faster) for most content types.

LinkedIn support

You can now add a LinkedIn account to FanMix! Once you’re signed in, click the add account button under “Connected Accounts”, and you’ll see this:

A few minutes after you add your LinkedIn account, you’ll see your LinkedIn conversations appear in your inbox. Cool, right?

We’ve rolled out some essential features with yesterday’s update.

Manage Facebook conversations (public & private)

FanMix now helps you manage any conversations you’re having on Facebook, including private message threads and public comment threads on status messages, wall posts, photos, videos and links. Any conversations you’ve started or joined will now appear in your FanMix inbox, mixed in with your conversations on Twitter.

Start new conversations from FanMix

We’ve added the first version of our message composer. Currently, it lets you start a new public conversation on Twitter or Facebook. After you start a conversation, it will appear in your Sent Messages folder. When someone replies, it will appear in your Inbox as an unread item.



We are now working on adding private conversations to the composer, letting you start a private Facebook thread or Twitter DM. As we add support for additional channels like LinkedIn, Disqus, WordPress, Tumblr, etc., they will be added to the composer as well. Our goal for the composer is to have it be the only tool our users need to start new conversations – public or private – on any social channel.

We flew out to Boulder, CO a few weeks ago to present the FanMix beta at Boulder Beta. Every attendee was given poker chips and asked to give them to the presenting team they liked most. We were delighted to find out that we successfully hoarded the most impressive pile of chips and won the “crowd favorite” award! Sadly, their photo guy didn’t take any shots of our table.

Thanks for the fun evening, Boulder Beta!

What is FanMix?

FanMix is an intelligent, universal inbox for all your public and private conversations online. Like millions of other people, you probably have conversations in many different channels: Facebook, Twitter, WordPress comments, Disqus comments, Reddit, etc. As you know, it’s often a huge pain to check for replies to things you’ve posted since these conversations are happening in lots of different places. It’s also basically impossible to search through your past conversations when you want to refer back to them in the future. FanMix solves these problems by bringing all your conversations together into a simple email-style experience.

Who can use it?

On the personal level, FanMix is for anyone that wants to kick ass at managing their social relationships online. While that might seem trivial at first glance, think about how many times you’ve let a thread on Facebook slide, or forgotten to respond to a Twitter mention, or neglected to check for replies to your own blog comments. FanMix brings all these conversations into one Gmail-flavored inbox, making it substantially easier to keep track and reply to them when you want to – all for the low, low price of free.

On the professional level, FanMix is for anyone that communicates online on behalf of their company or brand: social media managers, community builders, small business owners, PR agencies, freelancers, celebrities, startups, etc. While we are currently nailing down the core utility features of FanMix, we’ll be adding a great feature set for professionals in the near future. Team delegation, recommendations, automation, contact management, lead generation, deep relationship insights, and more. Details to follow in an upcoming article.

So who the hell are you?

FanMix was created by the founders of SocialEngine – Charlotte Genevier and myself (Alex Benzer). Since SocialEngine’s launch in 2007, we’ve seen our 8,500 customers build niche community websites with our platform. While many of these communities only hit a few hundred members, a few blossomed into very successful and talked-about social networks. While working on SocialEngine, Char and I observed the inception, growth, and sometimes death, of all these communities. We’ve learned that virtually all online communities – regardless of subject matter or purpose – need leadership to sustain growth. Specifically, leadership that takes a consistently active role in facilitating connections and conversations between members. It’s much harder than it sounds.

Char and I spent this summer at TechStars in Boulder. While we were there, the eleven other teams at the program were all preparing themselves to build online communities around their own startups. Despite the very high bar of requisite web-savviness at TechStars, there was a consensus that building a community around your startup (in various channels like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and so on) is always a huge pain. Free/cheap tools like Tweetdeck usually only work with one channel, tell you very little about the people you’re communicating with, and do very little to simplify the process of actually building community. Most of the teams relied on email to spread early buzz and collaborate with beta users. This gave us the idea to make social conversations much more like email – a format that everyone already understands – and roll in all your conversations from all the channels you care about into one Gmail-esque inbox.

Neato. When can I try it?

FanMix is currently at the invite-only beta stage. You can join the invite list, or harass us directly for an invite if you are so bold. We’d love to keep you posted on our progress, so please follow us on Twitter, join our Facebook page, or subscribe to our RSS feed.