It’s been a crazy week since we launched Mixel last Wednesday night. The feedback has been tremendously positive, but there have been some dissenters too. Particularly regarding our requirement that users login with Facebook.

We’ve heard many times that this is a challenge for some, a nonstarter for others, and downright offensive to a few. It’s been a heated discussion, and we’ve listened carefully. After finally catching my breath a bit, I managed to put together our thoughts on the subject. In the interest of making it as digestible as possible, I’ve framed it as a Q & A, and you can find it over at this link on the Mixel Web site.

Hopefully this will help clarify everything that we’ve been thinking about this topic. But to sum up quickly: the reason we use Facebook login is that it lets us build the Mixel community around real names. This is by far the most important element of Facebook for us, and the document explains why.

I’ll also add one more thing. It’s probably not much consolation to users who feel left out of Mixel to hear this, but it was a very difficult decision for us to go with Facebook, one that we didn’t take lightly. In fact, I agonized over it almost right up until we launched, and kept asking friends, colleagues, advisors and investors for their input. No one offered a strong enough counter-argument to Facebook though, and so we stuck with the decision.

I also realize that my answers will not change the minds of people who are dead-set against using Facebook. Nevertheless, we value and pay close attention to all the feedback we receive, and it pains me to know that some people have dismissed Mixel before trying it solely because of our login system. We don’t believe there’s a viable alternative today, but hopefully that will change tomorrow.

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The actual art-making tools available in our social collage app Mixel are pretty basic, with no modes and no calibration options. We shipped them that way for a good reason: we didn’t want people to feel that Mixel is a software application that they have to ‘master.’ A few moments is all you need to learn how to use all of the tools in the app, top to bottom.

Some people say that the tools are primitive, especially the cropping feature, which is downright imprecise. That one in particular is something we definitely want to improve, and we even intended to make it more powerful before we shipped the app but we ran out of time. We also left it as it was because we saw something really interesting in our beta testing that informed our whole attitude towards creative tools: imprecision is liberating. No one who tried to use Mixel’s crop tool to cut out a foreground image from its background ever felt that they were somehow “not using it right.” The tool is so rough and inexact that people believe there’s really no getting it wrong.

For us, that was a powerful realization, and one of the key insights that helped us make something fundamentally different from all of the other art software out there. The hugely constraining limitations of our toolset in effect let people off the hook, unburdened them of the pressure to make things perfect. It lets users create mixels in a few minutes, casually, almost without time to let their inner inhibitions about Art-with-a-capital-A take over. That’s exactly what we were going for.

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