When Facebook launched its API, the Opus Team had just come off an intense project and we were all feeling a little burned out. We thought making a Facebook application would be a fun diversion for us. But, we found ourselves stuck with the question: “What do we build?”

As a music company, it seemed natural for us to go to music. We already had a flash music player for indie artists called the Opus Player. It supports playlist sharing and music sales and it would have been pretty simple to port it over. But then again, how useful is a tool for promoting music in a place where everyone already knows who you are?

Going back to the drawing board, we decided we wanted to create something that was truly social but still in music. Something that wasn’t just, “Hey, look at my musical taste.” We wanted our application to say, “Let’s share a music experience together.”

Then it hit us.

When have we experienced music together?

• When we traveled together.
• When we were at parties.
• When we fell in love for the first time.

For anything in our lives, we had music. More specifically, we had mixes of music – collections of music based around a theme.

A social collection of music based around a theme.

The idea was gold, and we ran with it.

Working with Donat Group Enterprises, we hooked Facebook into a clean Drupal install. We wanted Mixx to feel like a Facebook application, so we embraced as we developed.

Six weeks passed and we had a workable application, but each time we added a feature, a UI tweak, or if we looked at it the wrong way, it would break. It never failed to break.

In short, we landed ourselves in a technical hole that was impossible to dig out of. After much deliberation, we ruefully decided rewrite our code from scratch. But, by this time, we needed to return our attention to the DYLAN project. We loved Mixx, but we couldn’t do it.

Things went a little stale as our attention shifted, but we quickly came to realize that Mixx actually solved some questions for DYLAN. With Mixx, we could test if users would contribute content to an “idea”. We could also test scalability, and the security of a repository for user contributed content.

Given this new mission, Mixx lived on, and exists now as you see it today.