DIY social network platform GROU.PS has just announced that it has acquired Social Project from MTV Networks. As part of the deal, GROU.PS will only be acquiring Social Project’s company and its users; and MTV will continue to own Social Project’s Flux social media publishing technology. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Similar to GROU.PS, Social Project let users create and customize profile pages and networks containing images, video and text. Social Project started life as Tagworld, before partnering with Viacom to add social media features to its sites. MTV subsequently bought the platform in 2008.

For GROU.PS this is really more of a customer acquisition than anything, in an effort to compete with the leader in the space, Ning. Social Project 15,000 third-party publishers on Flux will be given the opportunity to transition to the GROU.PS platform. Flux, which will continue to power the community tools and functionalities available to MTV Networks users.

GROU.PS, which has 5.5 million users, is currently used in over 160,000 global networks and has grown by around 50,000 networks over the past six months. With the acquisition, GROU.PS plans to increase their traffic by 15 percent. As part of the transition, GROU.PS and Social Project will work together to develop and introduce improved APIs and tools that will make it easier for third-party developers to extend GROU.PS networks.

Crunchbase

• GROU.PS

Company: GROU.PS

Website: grou.ps

Funding: $2.1M

Many of the best collaborative web apps are scattered across a number of different sites, making integration difficult. Grou.ps is attempting to solve this problem by offering a single login system that will combine many of the most common collaboration tools, allowing users to add and remove them with plug-and-play modules.

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