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Social Project Rolls Out First Tools for Flux Social Media Platform

Posted on: Monday, 3 December 2007, 15:00 CST

Social Project has started blazing a new open path across the social web, rolling out the first pieces of the Flux social media distribution platform for publishing partners. The platform enables media companies and content-focused bloggers to virally distribute their content and create connected online communities, while retaining ownership and branding controls.

Flux has been designed to provide an underlying community foundation for thousands of distinct branded sites. Social Project has already started working with a variety of partners, including Capitol Records recording artists such as MIMS and J Holiday; consumer brands like MTV Networks' TheDailyShow.com from COMEDY CENTRAL; as well as independent, emerging, underground culture influencers including The Plugg, 3hive, Ysabella Brave and X17online.

"Social activity on the Internet is not limited to a few well-known destination sites. Publishers realize their content must be accessible to as many communities as possible, since each will have an original and interesting point of view," Evan Rifkin, CEO, Social Project, explains. "We're making profiles and other social tools available wherever communities organically form."

Some of the best media brands have already built Flux communities while several more have committed to joining the platform. Since established brands are joining, new Internet brands that join the Flux platform benefit from one-click join and universal login. It's easy for existing Flux end users to find and join an interesting community and bring their friends, profile and media content with them.

Content on Flux can easily be shared with sites on and off the Flux platform. To drive user engagement, and increase page views and time spent, Flux partners can choose to integrate social-media tools ranging from modular widgets to fully-hosted user profiles and community pages.

Today, partners can choose from three levels of Flux integration: fShare, Flux Lite, and Flux Custom.

fShare is a widget that allows partners to seed the web with their content, leading new users back to their websites. fShare can be added quickly to videos, photos, and blog posts enabling site visitors to distribute content easily to popular online destinations such as MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter, as well as other communities on Flux. At the same time, fShare preserves the branding and attribution of the originating partner community as the content traverses the Internet to help increase traffic and brand awareness.

Flux Lite goes beyond fShare to provide partners with their own community of registered members, with member profile pages and a "Members Online" widget for the partner's existing site. A user friendly interface enables partners without technical expertise to customize these tools to match their existing site's look and feel.

Flux Custom includes fShare and Flux Lite, plus a full-blown community offering. Flux Custom can be added to existing sites or used to create an entire community from scratch. Features include fShare, member profile pages, member directory, sign-in, and online status, community pages, discussions, "Featured Members" tools, user-generated content and content detail pages. Complete community control is built in, with features such as content moderation/approval and user content flagging. Third-party widgets, media players, and commerce tools can also be seamlessly integrated.

All Flux platform tools work together to convert a traditional site into a next-generation media-distribution engine.

No matter which level of Flux integration a partner chooses, any data or content collected or displayed on the community remains the property of the partner, not Flux. Publishers have no start-up or maintenance fees, and Social Project shares advertising revenue from any pages powered by Flux. Flux tools can easily be incorporated into sites powered by other platforms such as TypePad and WordPress.

Social Project is an independent company with offices in Santa Monica, Calif., New York and Moscow.

Source: Business Wire

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