TC50: Mixtt Hooks Up Groups for Dating, Other Activities

Mixtt believes that social networks don’t do everything they should. Instead of focusing on just one person, Mixtt thinks that the best way for people to use social networks is to socialize outside the online world and do so in groups.

The startup presented today during the Collaboration session of TechCrunch50. You can watch a video of the presentation here.

Mixtt lets you sign up with your friends and give your group a name. Once complete, you can start adding events to your group calendar and find other groups in your area that you want to meet up with. To do that, you can use the company’s search function, which will let you search for groups based on city, age, and sex. In the beginning, though, Mixtt will only work in San Francisco, but will be rolled out to Los Angeles and New York City soon thereafter.

Mixtt has five main points that it believes will bring people to its service: it has social calendars to see what people are up to, it lets you meet new people without awkward dates, it can help you “hit it off” with a group of people, wingmen are there to bail you out, and it takes socializing offline to real places.

Expert Panelists

Kevin Rose:

“Why not build this as a Facebook application? ”

Answer: The company is building a companion Facebook app.

Don Dodge:

“I like it. Online dating is a huge business and it’s a big market. Your challenge is that it should be a widget on other social sites and building a social site is incredibly difficult because getting people to adopt is difficult. Location is critically important and hyper-local identification is extremely important. Third, you must have a cell phone interface and relying on a Web browser won’t cut it.”

Mark Cuban:

“How do you protect against the sleazy factor and how do you protect yourself from the creeps? The company said that it has a “report inappropriate content button” and can block. You have to come up with a way to pre-select so people have an idea of what they’re getting into before they go. Match.com turns into a group, which isn’t a bad thing, but is a challenge.”

Roelof:

“Presentation was very well done and good job of explaining product. My biggest concern is the coordination problem and how does a group create awkwardness. For what it’s worth, this has been done before in Southern California, and for some reason it didn’t work, so you should go find out what that company did wrong.”