Facebook Gets a Public Square in MingleWing [EXCLUSIVE]

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MingleWing is a separate site that takes anything you share on Facebook and puts it on a public page that other "minglers" can view or comment on (you retain control of exactly what appears there, of course). The site organizes posts into various topic sections -- Tech, Current Events and Cute, for example -- in a visual interface similar to Pinterest so anyone visiting is encouraged to browse and comment. The aim: starting conversations between Facebook users who wouldn't normally interact.

"The only people who see see [my Facebook updates] are my friends and people who subscribe to me," says site creator Dmitry Shapiro. "But here I can go to a centralized area based on topics and communicate with people I wouldn't normally interact with because they wouldn't see me."

It's no coincidence that Shapiro is the same person who brought us Anybeat, the so-called social network for taboo topics. Anybeat was made in the spirit of AOL chat rooms -- a place where anyone can stop in and talk about anything with anyone.

MingleWing is that idea writ large on the Facebook community. Describing it as a sister site to Anybeat, Shapiro uses Facebook's Connect and Commenting services to do the sharing. Users don't need an Anybeat account to start mingling, though Shapiro says there are plans to hook up the two services in the future.

The site also takes a page from Digg and Reddit in how it presents content. Everything shared on MingleWing has its own page, each of which includes the now familiar thumbs-up and -down icons. As users vote up or down pages, the more popular ones get shunted to the site's main page, in theory fueling ever more discussion.

"You can think of this as Reddit for Facebook," says Shapiro. "But Reddit is very text-heavy, so it appeals to a certain craft, mostly nerds. This is soft of for the rest of us."