The Social

MTV might've strayed away from music these days--My Super Sweet Sixteen, anyone?--but the entertainment mainstay's latest project aims to both bring it back to its roots and propel it into the social Web. Ambitious, yes.

'The Hills': Now telling you what you want to listen to.

(Credit: MTV)

It's called "Soundtrack," and it's an "interactive music guide for TV." If you're watching a heated moment of cattiness between Lauren and Audrina on The Hills and are dying to know what song's playing in the background, you can log on and find out exactly what it was. Then you can purchase the MP3, thanks to MTV's partnership with music service Rhapsody, as well as look up more soundtrack information from past programming. You can, of course, network with other members--this is powered by Flux, the social-networking technology that MTV Networks parent company Viacom built when it acquired a start-up called Tagworld.

Radio stations have been doing the "look up a song" gimmick for years, which makes it not particularly jaw-dropping for MTV to institute the same thing. But it does tap into a host of extremely popular and influential cable shows (for better or for worse) and cross-promotion on TV will likely boost traffic. Plus, it should be said that television soundtracks have become a crucial spot for music discovery--remember when The O.C. propelled California indie-pop bands to the heights of coolness a few years ago?

But MTV also hopes that Soundtrack, which will be worked into the main MTV.com site soon, will become an important promotional hub. There's a ranking of the top songs and artists--and it's a lot more obscure than iTunes or MTV's own TRL charts--and indie bands can create profiles to amass fans.

The indie band promotion may remind you a bit of PureVolume, which thrived for a while as a music promotion and discovery site before MySpace and an army of popular music blogs far surpassed it in influence. And MTV, too, has heretofore been a series of misses in the Web 2.0 space: Viacom lost out to News Corp. in the bidding for MySpace, which had fast become the Web's center for finding new music. The company also failed to jump on the music blog trend, which start-up Buzznet has quickly been amassing. The Twittering Moon Man didn't do much either.

Soundtrack, however, is MTV's most targeted and relevant Web 2.0 effort yet, and will likely be an appreciated attempt to bring at least some of the network's focus back to music. Considering how many people watch The Hills, it could make a difference.

Let's also hope MTV somehow ties Soundtrack into its most shining success of the digital age: video game Rock Band.

Flux, the social-networking initiative started by media giant Viacom, will officially support Google's OpenSocial standard. The developer site for Flux now says that OpenSocial implementation is "coming soon."

Flux, still in an early phase, was one of the few high-profile social networks that had not yet opted to partake in Google's developer standard. MySpace.com, Bebo, LinkedIn, and just about every other name in social media (except Facebook, which has opted to stick with its own developer platform, at least for now) had announced support for OpenSocial, and several have already invited developers to start hacking away. A source close to Flux told CNET News.com that Viacom had held off in part because of uncertainty over how secure the brand-new standard was in its earliest releases.

David Glazer, engineering director for OpenSocial at Google, said to CNET News.com on Thursday that version 0.6 of OpenSocial's application programming interface (API) specification contained large improvements over version 0.5, and that version 0.7, which was released to developers on February 6, contained additional incremental security upgrades.

Viacom first announced Flux in September as a platform for adding interoperable social-networking features to both Viacom-owned and external sites. Since then, it's been gradually rolled out to many MTV Networks (a subsidiary of Viacom) sites as the longtime pop culture influencer works to stay relevant in the digital age.

Viacom's MTV Networks unit announced on Tuesday that it has created Digital Fusion, a new-media advertising division designed to bring together the marketing for its oft-disparate digital brands.

Digital Fusion, according to a release from MTV Networks, encompasses both innovation and consolidation. On one hand, it's an efficiency move to give the company an edge in the increasingly competitive online-ad market. But with that renewed efficiency, MTV hopes to go further, using it to "create entirely new digital-ad products, from creative uses of existing inventory to original interactive experiences, including video content, online games, microsites, and widgets." Mobile content will also be a major component of the Digital Fusion strategy.

It's an ambitious plan indeed. MTV now counts its "digital portfolio" at more than 300 sites. After all, it's the sprawling group that counts among its ranks many of Viacom's youth- and pop culture-oriented cable television properties--MTV, MTV2, MTVU, VH1, VH1 Classic, CMT, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, TV Land, Noggin, The N, Spike TV--and the digital properties associated with those brands.

MTV Networks' digital initiatives grew more complicated earlier this year, when the company formally announced Flux, its much-anticipated foray into social networking. Since Flux operates on a "distributed" model that sites outside of MTV Networks can implement, the centralized advertising unit will likely help wrangle the advertising efforts across a diverse set of properties that might otherwise be unaffiliated.

In charge of Digital Fusion is Jason Witt, whose new title is senior vice president and general manager of the new unit.

We reported on Thursday that MTV Networks was close to announcing plans for a new social network; later that night, Fortune unveiled more details of the project. This is a new Viacom (MTV Networks parent company) endeavor called Flux, which is growing out of what once was Tagworld. Rather than being a "destination" social network, Flux is a distributed platform of social-media features that will be installed on select Viacom niche sites (like the Subterranean Blog, which we pointed out in our original post). It's powered by Social Project, the company formerly known as Tagworld, which Viacom invested in last year.

What this really resembles is MyBlogLog, the start-up purchased by Yahoo that adds social-networking features to blogs by letting visitors see who else is reading a site. It appears that Flux, however, will have stronger social features; it also won't be restricted to MTV Networks. A note on Flux.com says the platform "is robust enough for large media companies, such as MTV Networks, and flexible enough for influencer blog sites like Aquarium Drunkard, Vinyl Pulse and X1." We smell advertising opportunities.

Some Viacom divisions are also launching smaller social-networking initiatives; MTV's Think MTV activism-oriented vertical site, for example, now allows interested users to sign up for the beta version of a community site. It's not clear whether these will be Flux-ified or not.