Guys… Guys… Graydon, wake up. Listen. These [air quotes]social network[air quotes] things are soooooo hot. They’re really popular with children — who has kids here? Nobody? Ok, we got some, don’t worry. Paula, we do not want to hear about your uterine journey, no, just wait… later. At the Holiday Party. Sure. Slides. Whatever. — and our magazines are dying… Wired team, are you listening? This is for you. You guys like computers! So we’re doing Flip.com for girls. They’ll use it to connect to each other in… erm… how did those Estonian programmers put it? … meta-computational network of close-knit interactions using multimedia and high bandwidth social services including high quality video, image upload and processing, and just chillin’, yo. Can we pay attention, people? I have five girls outside this room. I want you to ask them what’s cool and we’ll write it down, send it to the copy editor, funnel it through legal and accounting, and then run it up to Anna who will then send it back to legal for a brush up and then we’ll send it to Estonia via FedEx and they’ll type in the content. Are we go? Team? Go? I am so LiveJournaling this!
Flip.com will offer girls a forum to create “flip books”: multimedia scrapbooks of photographs, home-made music videos and other postings. CondeNet hopes to tap into the same creative flair that girls show when they decorate their school lockers or textbooks. The site is Conde Nast’s answer to News Corp.’s MySpace, which — along with similiar sites such as Facebook — is drawing millions of young users and has made it difficult for magazine publishers to keep teenagers’ attention.
To Lure Teens to Its Latest Web Site, Conde Nast Turns to the ‘Flip Squad’ [WSJ]