But to be honest, the first objective of mixin is not media aggregation but to help people organize social activities more easily. The idea is to let people share, discuss and decide activities with their friends in a simple way. We want to help people to hook up not only by sharing what they plan to do, but also by letting people also make propositions, share ideas or just let other know that they are available at a certain time. Think of twitter but future oriented, to let you see what’s going to happen or what could happen. E.g No plan for Saturday afternoon, free for lunch in London today? Let your friends know it and get back to you with cool suggestions.

With the notion of user-centric website and web service we want people to be able to add activities to their agenda from the tools they are already using. For example you can directly create an (micro)event in mixin directly from twitter, just tweet “let’s meet and discuss the US election tonight” and mixin will automatically create an event in your agenda and send you back the link to it (we’ll do it via direct message soon). You can also post by Email, SMS, IM or from your iCal, google Calendar. You can also get notifications as you mentioned Chris but if you prefer you can get RSS, ICS and read your friends agenda in the tool you’re used to. We will add soon the obvious Facebook channel too. All together what is key for a service like us is to bring the added value we offer (let people share, discuss and decide activities) into the existing services, tools and communities. We know we’re just at the beginning so don’t hesitate if you have inputs / ideas, thanks!

Great post @chris! It’s great to have examples of how sites can be made starting with people. The task is then looking at the access and interactivity between people and the social objects a site produces IMHO.

A lot of issues with web applications is that they don’t address a specific problem. They are trying to capitalize on some trend like social networking for a specific niche.

Truly user centric websites focus on a solving a well defined problem rather than trying to offer a variation on well resolved issues.

Nice summary and fantastic examples.