Today we are unveiling two new ways to work with us:  Flux Lite and Flux Custom.  These are different ways to integrate with the Flux Platform, and both are connected to the fShare button.  Flux Lite and Flux Custom give our partners the power of the Flux social-distribution platform for media publishers.  This release is in response to the demand we are seeing from media companies of all sizes, to create an engaging community and make their content portable.  We encourage anyone with an existing media business (or an idea for one) to sign up, grab our tools, and create their own community. The Flux tools are powerful, but still in beta.  This release is the latest milestone on the way to creating an open platform for all media publishers.  We’ve taken the Flux platform that we used to create our existing communities, and opened it up to everyone - providing powerful tools that, with a little bit of digging, produce great communities.  You’ll notice many improvements in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, our focus is enabling new partners to get up and running as soon as possible.One of our primary product challenges is to expose the underlying platform to our partners in manageable chunks.  You’ll notice, as part of that effort, that we’ve published some fresh documentation.  Our Member FAQs provide answers to a cross-section of questions that may be posed by the end user.   Our Partner documentation outlines the details of how a partnership with Flux works.

With today’s release, we have also posted our partner agreement. Partners own all of their data – if you decide to leave the platform, you take that data with you.  You control your monetization strategy as well – an advertising overview is available here.  There are no restrictions on legitimate third-party applications – for instance, you can use Flux’s video player or integrate with popular video players like YouTube and Brightcove, or even use your own. 

There’s more to come.   We’ve got an aggressive roadmap and will continue to expose more powerful customizations, features, and integration points.  In the coming months, we’ll enable custom markup language to be available for all of our pages, modules, and widgets.  Power users will have infinite choices when it comes to design elements, functionality, and look-and-feel.  We will continue our commitment to openness by making our Flux Community pages, as well as our members’ Flux Profile pages, into OpenSocial containers.  Our extensible data access API will allow third-party application developers to mash our exposed data with our partners’ content and communities. 

As we say here at Social Project, “Let ‘er rip!”

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 12:31 am and is filed under Platform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.