MTV Networks has acquired the remaining portion of Social Project that it did not already own. Terms were not disclosed. Previously, MTV Networks was a minority investor in Social Project, which is behind the Flux social-networking platform powering many of its sites, including MTV.com, TheDailyShow.com, and ColbertNation.com. Social Project, which competes with Ning and KickApps, had previously raised $47.5 million, mostly from MTV’s parent company Viacom.

Social Project started life as Tagworld, before partnering with Viacom to add social media features to its sites. Last November, Flux was launched as a joint venture to let people create their own niche social networks and tap into Viacom’s vast library of video content. Since then, Flux has added about 2 million members, bringing the total to 7.6 million across about 1,000 different sites. The biggest one is MTV.com, with 600,000 registered members. Of those, 250,000 40,000 signed up on one day alone, the day of the MTV Video Music Awards on September 7. (You have to be registered to leave a rating or comment.). And, according to MTV Networks, engagement levels across all of MTV.com (as measured by time spent on the site and pageviews) are up 20 percent, and up 140 percent among Flux members.

Compared to other social networking platforms, Flux still powers a relatively small number of sites. For instance, there are 475,000 individual Ning social networks, compared to 1,000 for Flux. But the number of people each one reaches may not be so far apart. Although Ning does not break out its total number of registered members, comScore measures 6.9 million monthly unique visitors worldwide. That is not an apples-to-apples comparison to Flux’s 7.6 million registered users. Monthly visitors and registered users are two different things and, unfortunately, comScore does not do a good job measuring Flux. (For a point-by-point comparison of Flux and Ning, see Last year, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini analysis that we published last year on TechCrunch).

Flux, for its part, is trying to position itself more as a platform for sharing social media in than a social network per se. For instance, if I am a Flux member on MTV.com and then I join your Flux social network, I can automatically bring my entire collection of videos and other content that I’ve already organized on MTV.com with me. I’m not sure how much people will want to organize their social lives around Viacom content, but this acquisition does give the media company a way to add social networking features to all of its sites without relying on a someone else’s technology, whether that be Ning, Facebook, or MySpace.

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More Bells, More Whistles

Tonight at 10 pm California time Ning will launch a redesign (screencast here) that includes a updates to the photos, videos, groups, members, profile, forum and blog features (see here and here)

Ning is certainly feature rich, and users are flocking to it (a little porn never hurts, either). What I’d really like to know is how revenue growth is coming along. The company generates fees from advertising and users who want premium features. They’ve raised more than $44 million to date.

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Flux is a partially distributed social network. Like Ning (and more recently KickApps), it’s a place for sites to easily create a new social network, or bolt a social network onto an existing site, and add users from other platform social networks with a single click. Ning has the benefit of a big head start and over $44 million in funding. Since launching way back in late 2005, 165,000+ social networks have been created on Ning.

The two companies are serious rivals. In late November we published a point-by-point comparison of Flux and Ning as seen by Ning CEO Gina Bianchini. Few punches were pulled.

Flux is only a few months old, but had the benefit of not only Viacom’s money but also their brands – at launch hundreds of Viacom properties launched Flux social networks, including their MTV brands. In late November they opened the platform and anyone could join and create a social network.

Today, Flux says, they have grown to over a million registered members and 2,000 self-service created social networks. They also also released a developer API to give users more flexibility in creating social networks.

Flux may have far fewer social networks than Ning at this point, but the heft of the Viacom properties is clearly giving it a traffic boost. Comscore says Flux now has 5.8 million monthly unique visitors, compared to just 2.1 million for Ning (update: it has been pointed out in the comments that Compete data tells a different story).

Update 2: Flux may be taking off, but not as much as we thought. The January spike in the comScore data was a little suspicious, so we asked comScore to double-check that it was right. Turns out it was an “artificial increase” due to traffic not requested by users. comScore is revising its numbers to filter out the bad data. We’ll let you know what those are as soon as we hear.

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It may seem trite, but thousands of people are already creating unofficial wikis or joining communities (like fanpop) to talk about shows and products they love. Just Add Wetpaint gives businesses an easy way to generate an official community, as has been done with CSI, Dexter, Tmobile, the always-awesome Myth Busters, and even Oracle.

However, the move buts heads with other white label offerings (these) going after consumer brand communities, most notably Ning and Flux. Companies looking to launch their own communities will have to choose between the offerings (wikis and social networks).

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The platform is the cornerstone of Viacom’s social network strategy. Instead of building independent networks for MTV and its hundreds of other brands, they’ve built a distributed platform that shares users, infrastructure and content, but allows for distinct branding and community building around each property. And Flux isn’t just for Viacom – third parties are using it as well.

When Flux launched it had only a few hand picked non-Viacom partners. Today they are opening up the platform for anyone that wants to join.

Like Ning, it’s fairly easy to create a Flux social network. The look and feel can be customized via templates or by uploading your own CSS, and the network can be mapped to your domain name.

Once created any Flux member can join your network with a single click. Since Flux is already gaining users via their launched Viacom and other properties, this gives young communities a deeper pool of users to draw from. And the fact that new users do not need to create a new profile, friends list or login credentials gives them a greater incentive to join. User data is exportable, Flux says, if the partner creates a privacy policy stating that.

Partners have three integration choices. fShare, the basic integration, allows users to take content from the site and easily embed it into other social networks. Flux Lite allows partners to create a basic social network. Flux custom gives nearly full control over the look and feel and has additional features. Partners can choose any integration, it just takes a little more work to use the custom features. Flux will add new developer features over time as well. The chart to the right (click for larger view) shows the various options.

We’ve created a test social network on Flux, at techcrunch.flux.com. And we’re also integrating their fshare functionality into the main TechCrunch site as an illustration of how it works – see the button below each post.

Flux partners can choose to show Flux ads on the site, or use their own. Flux says they are currently selling at a $1.50 CPM and will split that 50/50 with partners. If a partner chooses to display their own ads instead, they must split revenue with Flux 50/50 as well.

Flux v. Ning

Flux and Ning have very similar features and will compete for communities looking to build a social network (and there are lots of other choices as well). Ning has an established platform, lots of money, and 130,000 existing communities (including Playboy). Flux also has a great platform, and the leverage of all the Viacom properties to promote it.

Ning sees the threat from Flux. CEO Gina Bianchini wrote a fiery point-by-point comparison of the two services earlier this week – Flux disputes some of the facts.

Ning is currently supporting Google’s Open Social platform. Flux says they will fully support Open Social beginning in January.

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Ning, which launched in 2005, has raised over $44 million in capital and has 130,000 social networks on its platform. Ning was founded by CEO Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen, pictured to the right.

Flux, which launched in September, is a joint venture between Viacom and Social Project (formerly Tagworld). They are pre-launch, but power a number of social networks around Viacom properties (including MTV) and third party sites.

The two companies are on a collision course. Both platforms share users, meaning once someone has signed up for one social network on the platform, joining another one requires just a single click. Ning has built its community from the bottom up, and has benefited from backlash against the big, sometimes impersonal social networks. Flux, the newcomer, carries the weight of Viacom’s hundreds of brands behind it and will soon open up to any third party that wants to join.

But something about Flux doesn’t sit well with Bianchini, who sent us a long analysis of their business model. She goes into detail on Viacom’s history with partners, their tendency towards litigation, and conflicts between Flux’s marketing materials and terms of service. Flux undoubtedly will respond. For now they have no comment.

The analysis, written by Gina Bianchini, is below. I’m staying neutral on this for now until Flux fully launches and they’ve had time to respond to this. But I’ll say this – it is refreshing to see a company be willing to mix it up and say exactly why they think they are the better service. Too often, PR-speak gets in the way of clear communication. That certainly didn’t happen here.

Update: Social Project has asked us to point out that the sections of the “Terms of Service” excerpted in the post below are from the Social Project Terms of Use (for end users) and a third party Privacy Policy (also for end users). The information does not come from Flux’s third-party partner agreement. Third-party partners on Flux retain rights to their data and users. Social Project is an independent company with no controlling investor.

Flux: A Point-By-Point Analysis

Executive Summary

Flux is a new service from Viacom that enables companies to theoretically create branded social networks.

With Flux, artists, music labels, and soon individuals are handing over their rights and ownership in the social networks they create to Viacom, a litigious company with a single, rigid social networking application that can’t be customized nor virally distributed.

With 130,000 social networks – 100,000 of which have been created in the past nine months alone – Ning is the hands down leader in branded social networks.

With Ning, the artist or individual controls their network, their content, their brand, and their destiny with an infinitely flexible platform offered by a well-funded independent company with a track record of innovation.

The Facts

1. Ning is the largest provider of branded social networks on the Internet today.
2. Social networks on Flux aren’t viral.
3. Flux’s social networks have extremely limited control and customization options. You can’t make it yours.
4. On Flux, Viacom owns everything. On Ning, you do. 50 Cent created his own social network on Ning despite his label creating one for him on Flux. Why? Because he owns his network on Ning, on Flux Viacom does.
5. On Flux, Viacom has the exclusive right to make money – or control who does. On Ning, you do.
6. Viacom has a history of unsuccessful online initiatives.
7. Viacom has a history of suing partners.
8. In software, platforms like Ning win. Single applications like Flux don’t. And single applications that seek to control people on rights issues while ignoring viral distribution are death.

Fact: Ning is the largest provider of branded social networks on the Internet today.

With over 130,000 social networks – 100,000 of which have been created in the past nine months alone – Ning is the hands down leader in branded social networks.

Flux is reincarnated application from Tagworld, a MySpace clone from 2004, which Viacom purchased quietly this year.

Fact: Social networks on Flux aren’t viral.

Flux relies exclusively on external video services like YouTube or Brightcove for videos. Here’s an example of a video on Interscope’s 50 Cent website:

As you can see, there is no option for 50 Cent to have his own watermarked video player, photo slideshow, or music player on Flux. (Editors note: see Bianchini’s blog post on the need for control over video players for more on this).

Furthermore, Flux’s new fShare feature demonstrates that as a large, traditional media company, they do not understand viral distribution. fShare simply enables a user to add a YouTube or Brightcove video from Flux to another service like MySpace with a click. That’s great, but it’s still a YouTube or Brightcove video that actually sends someone back to YouTube or Brightcove, not the network itself. This dramatically limits the virality of the social networks on Flux and ensures the continued success of YouTube and Brightcove at the expense of the new network.

In contrast, viral distribution is built into every branded social network on the Ning Platform. Invitations. Sharing. Easy integration with Facebook and MySpace. Viral video players, photo slideshows, music players, and badges are all uniquely branded for each social network. All enable massive distribution at zero cost. And – unlike Flux – they are yours.

Here’s an example of Powder Church, a social network on Ning for skiers:

And here’s Powder Church’s embeddable branded photo slideshow widget that comes automatically with any social network on Ning:

Find more photos like this on Powder ChurchAs you can see, the widget watermark is uniquely branded for Powder Church and, if you click on it, you’re sent back to Powder Church. While the members of your network can pull in videos from around the web into your social network on Ning, the primary widgets are all uniquely branded for your social network. Not YouTube. Not Brightcove. Not DailyMotion.

Fact: Flux’s social networks have extremely limited control and customization options. You can’t make it yours.

The ability to customize Flux’s social networking features is limited.

Here are the questions on 50Cent.com, powered by Flux:

• About Me
• Occupation
• Favorite Music
• Favorite Shows & Movies
• Interested in
• Looking for
• Relationship Status
• Interests

And here are the questions on pcdmusic.com, powered by Flux:

• About Me
• Occupation
• Favorite Music
• Things That Make me Laugh
• Tagline
• Interested in
• Relationship Status

It’s a different ordering of the same generic questions. Nothing specific to either artist. Limited customization.

In contrast, profile questions on your social network on Ning are created by you, making them unique to your branded social network. For example, take Wakefirst, a social network for wakeboarders on Ning:

Here are the profile questions on Wakefirst:

• Male or Female
• Where are you from (City, State)
• When did you start wakeboarding?
• Favorite Lakes
• Do you own a boat or ride with friends?
• What do you ride?
• What’s pulling you?

Membership in Wakefirst is about the passion for wakeboarding. Plus, these questions are then used for highly targeted advertising and sponsorships by wakeboarding equipment companies.

Fact: On Flux, Viacom owns everything. On Ning, you do.

According to Flux’s Terms of Service, Viacom owns everything on any social network created on Flux. This is at direct odds with their marketing splash page for Flux:

So, that’s what’s they’re marketing. Now let’s look at Flux’s Terms of Service:

On ownership of the social network on Flux

From the Flux Terms of Service: “The past, present, and future content of the SP Service, including, without limitation, all applicable software in any format, organization, designs … and all other materials related to the SP Service and the SP Service itself …and other intellectual property (individually and collectively, “Material”) are protected by applicable copyrights and other proprietary (including, but not limited to, intellectual property) rights and are, as between SP and you, the property of SP.”

In plain English, even partners such as music labels don’t own the networks on Flux. Viacom does.

In contrast, you own your network on Ning. From the Ning Terms of Service: “Ning does not claim any ownership rights in the Content or the Code you provide. You, as the Network Creator, own the Code you develop (“your Code”). You also own the Content you create and upload (“your Content”). After posting your Content or your Code, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content or Code, and you continue to have the right to use and license your Content and your Code in any way you choose.”

On ownership of the social network’s content

From the Flux Terms of Service: “You grant to SP the unqualified, unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, and royalty-free right, license, authorization, and permission, in any form or format, on or through any media or medium and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed or discovered, in whole or in part, to host, cache, store, maintain, use, reproduce, distribute, display, exhibit, perform, publish, broadcast, transmit, modify, reformat, or translate, all or any portion of your User Content on the SP Service and any other channels, services, and other distribution platforms, whether currently existing or existing or developed in the future, of SP(collectively, the “Channels”), for any purpose whatsoever (including, without limitation, for any promotional purposes) without accounting, notification, credit, or other obligation to you, and the right to license and sub-license and authorize others to exercise any of the rights granted hereunder to SP in our sole discretion. These rights include without limitation, the right to distribute and synchronize all or any portion of your User Content in timed relation to any other visual elements; to web cast, pod cast, re-publish, re-broadcast, re-platform, port, syndicate, route, and link to and from all or any portion of your User Content; to encrypt, encode and decode, and compress and decompress all or any portion of your User Content; to edit, mix, combine, merge, distort, superimpose, create or add special effects, illusions, and/or other material to or of all or any portion of your User Content;; and to excerpt and/or extract portions of your User Content in order to host, store, index, categorize, and display your User Content on or through the Channels.”

In plain English, every single member of the network – including the artist and network creator – just handed over the keys to Viacom.

In contrast, you own your content on Ning. From the Ning Terms of Service: “Your Content remains yours. We claim no ownership interest in the Content you provide on Networks running on the Ning Platform.”

On ownership of member data

Flux says on their marketing page, “Data collected is your data.” Analyzing the Terms of Service, this is simply not true.
From the Flux Terms of Service: “By visiting these sites, you affirmatively consent to our collection, use and distribution of your data. We may share your information with other third parties with whom we have business relationships and, in some cases, we cannot control or know their privacy practices. By visiting our sites, you affirmatively consent to our collection, use, and distribution of your data.”

Beyond this, the only reference in the Flux Terms of Service that may conceivably address member data ownership is: “Except for the licenses, authorizations, consents, and rights granted hereunder and described in this Agreement, SP acquires no title or ownership rights in or to any User Content you submit and nothing in this Agreement conveys to us any ownership rights in your User Content. SP is acting only as a host, bulletin board, or conduit for submitted User Content, with all of the specific rights granted by you hereunder.”

The problem with this is that it’s gutted by the content license above which enables Flux to do anything they want with your content.

In contrast, on Ning you control your members and their data. From the Ning Terms of Service: “If you, as a User of a Network, agree to a Network’s privacy policy, you agree that any dispute you have with a Network Creator is between you and that Network Creator (and not Ning).”

Saying Social Project is an independent company is insincere

Viacom owns a significant stake in Social Project (aka the company formerly known as Tagworld aka a MySpace clone from 2004) which is doing nothing other than providing Flux on behalf of Viacom. There is no other service of the company.

To argue that Social Project is an independent company is the equivalent of saying that Enron’s shell corporations in the Cayman Islands were independent. In theory, perhaps. In reality, no way.

In contrast, Ning is well-funded, independent company with a track record of innovation and Terms of Service that have consistently been pro-Network Creator from the start. We believe there is a compelling way to profitably grow the Ning Platform explicitly because we are pro-Network Creator.

Fact: On Flux, Viacom has the exclusive right to make money – or control who does. On Ning, you do.

From the Flux Terms of Service: “The SP Service is to be used solely for your noncommercial, non-exclusive, and limited personal use and for no other purposes without the express prior written consent of SP…SP reserves the sole and exclusive right to sell advertising and otherwise exploit, benefit from, and/or realize revenue from the conduct of its business and operating the SP Service, the User Content Submission Features or other Channels, and any and all arrangements made with respect thereto, without accounting, obligation, or liability to you, notwithstanding that your User Content may be displayed on or otherwise used by or in connection with the SP Service, the User Content Submission Features, or other Channels.”

From the Ning Terms of Service: “Ning offers fee-based premium services on the Ning Platform. If you choose to sign up for a premium service, you agree to pay the applicable fees and abide by any additional requirements or rules associated with that premium service.”

In plain English, you pay us $19.95 per month; you can run your own ads and you keep 100% of whatever advertising revenue you generate from your social network. If you want to sell a subscription or goods on your network, go for it. It’s your network. It’s your choice. You control it.

Fact: Viacom has a history of unsuccessful online initiatives.

Not to throw stones, but Viacom does not have the best track record of successful online initiatives. From Valleywag and Computerworld August 22, 2007, here’s the history:

• November 1996 Yahoo and MTV announce the creation of UnfURLed, “the ultimate guide to music on the Web.” The site is promised to launch in January 1997.
• January 1997 UnfURLed does not launch.
  July 1997 UnfURLed launches, six months late. The site later disappears, forgotten.
• February 1999 Viacom acquires Imagine Radio, a service which lets users listen to preprogrammed music channels, or create their own. (If that sounds a lot like Last.fm or Pandora, that’s because it was a lot like those sites.)
• May 1999 Viacom acquires SonicNet, an online music-news and information site.
• August 1999 Amid Internet fervor, Viacom creates the MTVi Group as a rollup of its Internet websites, hoping to take it public to cash in on the market for Internet stocks.
• August 2000 With an IPO off the boards, Viacom reorganizes MTVi, giving control over websites like MTV.com and VH1.com back to their respective cable channels.
• 2001-2004 MTV does nothing interesting with Internet music for five years or so, as best we can tell.
• April 2005 MTV launches Overdrive, a broadband “channel.” MTV later brags about how many “video streams” Overdrive serves, not noticing the complete apathy with which music fans greet it.
• July 2005 News Corp. swoops in and inks a deal to buy the parent company of MySpace. Viacom is widely reported to have been interested in buying MySpace, which gained popularity by embracing music on user profiles and getting bands to use the site to communicate with fans.
• January 2006 Microsoft and MTV launch Urge, an online music store.
• August 2006 Google and MTV announce an experimental deal to distribute videos over Google’s AdSense network. The experiment, apparently a failure, dissolves quietly.
• September 2006 Viacom CEO Tom Freston, a longtime MTV exec, is fired, reportedly for missing the chance to buy MySpace. Later that month, Microsoft knifes MTV in the back by announcing its Zune player and companion store, rendering Urge pointless.
• August 2007 MTV merges Urge into RealNetworks’ also-struggling Rhapsody music service.

Is it fair to ask what’s going to be different with Flux?

Fact: Viacom has a history of suing partners.

From The Boston Globe March 12, 2004:

“Satellite provider EchoStar Communications Corp. resumed broadcasting Viacom Inc.’s CBS and cable channels yesterday on its Dish Network after resolving a contract dispute that left millions of viewers without Nickelodeon, MTV, and Comedy Central.”

From the New York Times August 7, 2006

“Google has struck a deal to allow Web site owners to put video clips from Viacom, including “SpongeBob SquarePants” and MTV’s “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County,” on their pages. The clips will be accompanied by advertising, with Viacom, Google and the site owners dividing the ad revenue.”

From the New York Times March 14, 2007

“Viacom, the parent company of MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, filed a wide-ranging lawsuit against Google on Tuesday, accusing it of “massive copyright infringement.” Viacom said it was seeking more than $1 billion in damages and an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from committing further infringement.”

From the Wall Street Journal July 20, 2007:

“The Law Blog has a special place in its heart for Viacom, and it’s not because the company has created some of our daughter’s favorite TV shows. It’s just that the media giant and its boss Sumner Redstone (Harvard Law LLB) provided us with so much rich material.”

Viacom is a big fish. A big fish whose partnerships – especially with other media and technology companies – tend to end badly.

Fact: In software, platforms like Ning win. Single applications like Flux don’t. And single applications that seek to control people on rights issues while ignoring viral distribution are death.

Flux is a single social networking application that only internal developers can touch. Flux isn’t a platform. There is nothing about Flux that would make it a platform. You can’t program it. You can’t add features to it. And you don’t own the application.

On Ning, you can and you do. Ning is an infinitely flexible platform for creating branded social networks. Viral distribution is built into every branded social network on Ning.

Solid, independent engineering-driven companies are uniquely able to create platforms. Why? Because it’s hard to do. And they have consistently dominated the Internet since its inception. Single applications created by large, traditional media companies – especially ones that treat the rights of artists and individuals as something to dominate – have not.

As an artist or individual, it’s incredibly important to pay attention to the fine print. In the final analysis of the fine print, Ning provides a superior, infinitely flexible social network that is uniquely yours in every way that matters.

Kent Nichols of Ask a Ninja sums it up nicely:

“With Ning, you get an instant social network and you get to own it. Flux is just another big media play to screw over individual artists. Who are you going to trust? The guy that gave us the web browser and the magic of the Internet, or the guys who gave us The Hills and Jackass?”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

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Flux, the new distributed social network that was created via a partnership between Viacom and Social Project (formerly Tagworld), has been busy since their September launch.

Flux is a “distributed” social network in the sense that publishers can plug it in around their existing site, effectively bolting a social network onto their existing communities. Viacom continues to add its hundreds of website properties to Flux. But dozens of unaffiliated third parties have joined, too (such as Winelibrary). See a list of many of the participating sites here.

Today Flux launched the first key part of their platform called fshare. In general its a way for sites with video content to allow users to share that content by placing it on other sites. See the 50Cent site for an example, and click on any of the latest videos on the bottom left of the page. Then click on the fshare button. You can then add the video to various social networks, or just add it to your list of favorite content. Friends from any Flux network will then be able to see that content in your “news stream” and add/share it themselves.

Ok, so sharing content in this way isn’t exactly rocket science. But seeing it in action shows the value of a decentralized network where each community has a stand alone community and culture but where members cross pollinate content around the various sites.

Flux is certainly similar to Ning (which by the way continues to grow rapidly, see Comscore chart). But the approach is different. Ning is drawing lots of users who are creating brand new networks, perhaps tangentially related to existing brands. Flux is all about taking existing sites, even big ones, and turning them both into social networks as well as part of a bigger network of networks. Both might do well – Ning has momentum, but Flux has huge existing partners right out of the gate due to the Viacom relationship.

The key point in Flux’s growth with come when they turn on the self service mechanism and let sites join the network at will. That’s promised for sometime this year, so we won’t have long to wait.

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Tomorrow morning they are launching the fruit of that partnership – an ambitious new disaggregated social network around Viacom’s MTV, Comedy Central and other brands and associated websites called Flux.

Tagworld/Social Project cofounder Evan Rifkin and Mika Salmi, the president of Global Digital Media for MTV, walked me through the product earlier this afternoon. A screen shot of the unlaunched service is below.

The new service takes technology developed by Tagworld and Viacom’s existing Flux brand and creates distinct social network properties for each of the brands (some are launching now, hundreds are launching throughout the rest of the year). Like Ning, users who sign up for any network (say, Comedy Central’s) can join other networks (like MTV’s) with a single click.

As users add additional communities to their profile, they bring their content and friends with them. Flux is simultaneously a single brand as well as hundreds of distinct, branded social networks.

Not Just About Viacom Brands

Flux is opening up to companies and brands outside of the Viacom family. Twenty non-Viacom sites have been quietly testing the service for some time. See, for example, Vinyl Pulse and 50Cent. Both have integrated social networks built by Tagworld. They’re not yet co-branded under the Flux service, but will be now that the service is officially launching. New third party sites will soon be able to apply to join the Flux network; in the future there an API and other tools will become available that will let anyone join.

As I said above, comparisons will inevitably be drawn to Ning and white label social networks (see our overview of various white label services here and here).

But 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.

What Happens To Taworld?

The existing Tagworld site remains as is, although the company is turning off new registrations for now and focusing entirely on Flux.

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