Me.com Launches SNAPP Free

My company, Me.com, provides a social networking platform known as SNAPP that is built around a connected community model. Today, it announced the availability of SNAPP Free.  Here is the full press release, which has some nice customer, analyst and partner (Google) quotes.

The "so-what" of SNAPP Free, which is targeted at enabling community builders (versus chasing after consumers) is two fold:

1. It is the first social networking platform where community builders actually materially share in the ad revenues generated by their community.  Thanks to a partnership with Google AdSense, we actually split the Google ad revenue 50/50 with the community builder on top of providing a free, hosted solution (yes, we could be nuts). We do all of the ad management for the community builder so it is truly turnkey and self-service. It’s all about sharing the wealth on the premise that self-interest is a great motivator to bring the best community builders out of the woodworks and into the Me.com Universe.

2. Me.com’s aspiration is to be the Un-MySpace so we have built our solution around a connected community model whereby communities are vertically focused (some of the 60+ communities include: Second Life - http://sl.me.com, a community built by fanatical Second Lifers; Orthodox Circle - http://portal.orthodoxcircle.com/, a community of orthodox Christians; Ragan Communications - http://www.myragan.com/, a B2B community of professional communicators; and Batanga – http://www.batanga.com, a media company focused on Latinos). In turn, these communities are horizontally integrated based on common services that leverage integrated databases for things like churches, high schools/universities, cities/zips, autos, pets, etc. Finally, community members can move some, all or none of their profile and user data between communities in a click via a virtual passport that rewards homesteading while allowing people to express different aspects of their offline personas in the online realm. 

We believe that the net effect of what we are building is that it creates highly targeted audiences, the sweet spot for advertisers, while aggregating audiences to create scale.  Think Comcast for Social Media.

Here are two past posts I have written on the topic:

Connected Communities, Me.com and SNAPP

Mega brands, online communities and “three walled” gardens

Screen shots of the AdSense integrate, a community view customization tool and what the end product looks like in SL.Me.com follows…