Recent post on TechCrunch: MTV has launched a competitor to Hot or Not , and they're calling it NextorNot:
This Monday, MTV quietly deployed a Hot or Not competitor called NextorNot.
The premise, as with Hot or Not, is simple: users flip through “profiles” of other users (consisting mainly of a portraits) and indicate whether they think the people in the profiles are attractive or not. In NextorNot’s case, you hit the “I Like” button to indicate you find the user attractive or the “Next” button to see the next profile (thus, the “not” in NextorNot is actually a good thing).
Yay MTV. Now, what I really found interesting about this was a lonely little innocuous sentence at the end of the post:
MTV’s parent company, Viacom, has been busy in the Web 2.0 sphere recently, launching a disassociated social network called Flux, previously known as Tagworld.
So, with the knowledge that the social networking ship has sailed, I meander over to flux.com to privately ridicule Viacom for spending lots of money to create yet another "Facebook." O, but I had a surprise coming.
Flux powers the communities on your favorite websites and lets you take your profile, friends, and content with you across the social web. Whenever you see the logo on a website, you can join that community with a single click and take all your stuff with you.
Distributed Social Network???... I read on...
Current communities live or scheduled include major brands such as MTV, BET, The Daily Show, and VH1.
We’re also working with emerging brands such as X17, Cat Power, The Plugg, Ysabella Brave, Pop Bytes, Film School, Egotastic, Happiest Gay Couple, DubCNN, SlamXhype, High Snobiety, Nah Right, Vinyl Pulse, FashionTribes, 3Hive, Kevin Michael, and PopMatters.
I click on the link to X17. I click a few buttons on the site. This looks a lot like MySpace.
THIS LOOKS A LOT LIKE MYSPACE!!!!!
It seems that Viacom, archnemesis of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., is pulling out all the stops ($40 million in stops, actually) to create a MySpace competitor by building a social media community around the web, and they're calling it Flux. See the excerpt below from a TechCrunch piece on it.
Flux really is a network of networks. While it is most like Ning, the walls between the Flux networks are very porous - uses drag content (photos, videos, etc.) between sites, perhaps grabbing a video from the 50Cent site and presenting it on their profile at the MTV site. While each community has distinct branding, the individual users see groupings of brands that they enjoy under a single profile.
I must say, I'm impressed. Will be interesting to see where this goes...
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