Rather than sitting down and figuring out how to best use this new fangled Facebook thingy, Pearson has decided to strike out on their own and start a social networking site for teens.
The publisher Pearson is preparing to launch its own social network to capitalise on the success of a website designed to encourage reading among teenagers.
Pearson, which owns Penguin Books and the Financial Times, set up Spinebreakers as an “online book community for teens” in September 2007 and plans a significant overhaul to allow users to connect to each other before the end of the year.
Anna Rafferty, the digital managing director for Penguin in the UK, said: “We want to develop peer-to-peer capabilities and have plans for a full social network. I would love to have teenagers tagging their favourite books and sharing it with their friends.”
She hopes the site will become an important part of a teenager’s social networking portfolio. “We want to allow elegant integration with other sites. For example, it would be good if tagging a book on Spinebreakers would show up in your Facebook newsfeed,” she said.
Um. Yeah. I’m glad you’re excited… Mom… It’s always cool and popular when adults get really into teen things and help MAKE THEM BETTER! You can put the tray of cookies over there… (To put their teen usage stats into context, Bookninja gets many times as many visitors every month, and we are neither a multinational corporation, nor able to sustain a social network, one would think…)