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Key trends in social networking and media

MM: Perhaps we can go next with a broad overview in terms of key developments and trends in social networking and social media.

RT: Sure.

We’re a very interesting kind of company, from maybe some other social networking companies out there.

Omnifuse came about because my business partners and I had created a community around action sports—icelounge.com. We actually tested our own platform out and created our own community. We went through the whole process of seeding a community from scratch, understanding the taxonomy and searchability of community while figuring out what features and functions people needed to have to create a great interactive experience.

We come from the experience of building our own community and the technology around it.

It’s interesting. Our platform is now on its fourth major version. If you think back to the days of e-commerce when people were just bolting stores on to their existing web presence; that was kind of the tactic we took originally with FUSION. It was a bolt-on community to an existing web presence.

As our product matured and we continued down the path of listening to what our customers really want from our technology offering—FUSION has become a very large content management system that includes user-generated content as well as other types of managed content.

Content can be anything from a blog or forum or posting a comment, a rating or review. A video file. A picture. A page.

These systems are becoming more and more tightly integrated and becoming the primary web presence for these companies. That’s been the trend for FUSION — and seeing how we’ve moved from, “We’ll make it look like yours and bolt it on,” to having all aspects of web presence completely interconnected.

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