With this week’s update, we’ve added a “reach” total for all your Twitter conversations in FanMix. We calculate this by adding together the total followers of any people involved in the conversation plus the total followers of any retweeters. This gives you an estimate of the total number of people that may have seen your conversation.

FanMix also shows you the reach totals for all your conversations, right in your inbox.

Over time, we’ll be improving our reach tracking to make it more accurate and accessible for other channels outside Twitter. How would you like to see this developed further? Charts? Sorting conversations by reach? Let us know!

Disqus Support

FanMix now lets you add multiple Disqus accounts to your social inbox. When you add a Disqus account, FanMix will pull in all the conversations you’ve had in Disqus comment threads around the web, making them easily searchable. You’ll also be notified when you have new replies to your Disqus comments, and you can easily reply back right from FanMix or Gmail. If you have a blog that uses Disqus, or you comment on a lot of other blogs, this makes it much easier to organize your conversations and keep on top of replying to people.

Reply/retweet links

We’ve added “reply” and “retweet” links to messages in Twitter conversations, making it easier to reply to specific messages in a conversation thread, or retweet individual tweets from a thread.

Better conversation threading

When conversations include more than two people, they are now visually threaded, making it clearer how replies relate to one another.

10X speed improvement

We’ve overhauled our database to accommodate the recent surge in new FanMix users. Searches and all page loads are now about 10X faster. We’ve also revamped the frontend so that FanMix now loads all data with AJAX, giving it a more responsive feel.

More great stuff coming soon – stay tuned!

If you’re anything like us and the millions of other decent Internet folk out there, you spend a lot of time in Gmail. It’s not just your conversational command center. It’s an extension of your brain. You rely on it to remember who people are, when you’ve had conversations with them, and what those conversations were about.

At least for email, anyway.

But conversations don’t just happen over email. We’re all having more and more public and private conversations on social channels like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s really annoying to manage all these non-email conversations from their respective inboxes. This often becomes a major burden and time suck for anyone that is even moderately active on more than one social channel.

This is one of the key pains we are attacking with FanMix. But FanMix is another inbox, right? Who want’s another inbox to check when you still have your email inbox, even if FanMix consolidates all the others?

Well I’m glad you asked, because now you can use FanMix right inside Gmail! We’ve just released the first version of our Chrome extension, which instantly adds your FanMix inbox right into your Gmail menu. Here’s what mine looks like:

As you can see, I’ve got 5 new or updated social conversations. When I click this link, I can see them right in Gmail’s main window:

Yes, the UI has plenty of room for improvement, but it works and we think it’s awesome. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

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!

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?

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?

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.

Thanks for the fun evening, Boulder Beta!

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.