Industry Note: What the Flux
What's Viacom's play with Flux (nee the uber-lame TagWorld)?
Simple - Viacom wants to create an infrastructure platform for publishers to add "community features" (ie, members, forums, photo-sharing, maybe, you know the score).
Here's an example of a Fluxed community.
There are two points to note.
1) This is kind of a smart play - perhaps even smarter than Viacom knows. If you can't beat 'em, fragment 'em. It's not just that Viacom is trying to aggregate attention along the tail: it is actively creating incentives which will drive hyperfragmentation.
1.5) It's like the anti F8 -
"...You can always move off of Flux and take your community data with you. If it’s not working for you, it’s not working for us."
1.75) Conversely, it's kind of like a Blogger 2.0.
2) It's a Trojan Horse for a Viacom ad net.
Interesting move, guys.
But to really make it work, you'll have to understand what Facebook is (a network) - and why it's not a community. Oh yeah, and you'll have to not make it just another lame corporate social net (of nets, whatever).
Ok, ok, that was a lame title :)