Social news site Mixx introduced a new feature today: Mixx Communities. Mixx always had a strong emphasis on 'groups,' but Mixx Communities takes this to a different level by offering a higher degree of customizability and a stronger emphasis on communication between group members.

There has been a recent trend of allowing groups of users to take greater control over their experiences on social news sites and Mixx's efforts add some interesting ideas to this.

Setting up a Mixx community is very straightforward. Besides deciding on obvious things like a name, color scheme, and categories, users can chose to pre-populate their community with content already available in Mixx by importing items tagged with up to ten different keywords.

The communities also feature their own message boards and the ability to add polls. There is also a 'member lounge',' where the recent activities of group members are displayed. Karma points a user earns in one of the communities are added to the 'general Mixx karma pool', an important feature for many power-users