Guardian adopts Pluck technology to engage social networks

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Guardian Unlimited will use technology from US social media developer Pluck to power community services on the site and encourage greater interaction with social networks.

Later this year, the newspaper site will introduce Pluck's SiteLife Social Media Platform, a set of social media tools that allows creation of blogs, forums, polls, comments and deeper levels of participation with the readership.

"The existing functionality on our site for communities and user management will transfer to this new platform," Tom Turcan, Guardian's general manager of digital, told Journalism.co.uk.

"We have had a couple of years experience now of blogging, Comment is Free, user-ratings and polls and so on and all of that will form part of what we implement on the Pluck platform but we are going to go beyond that… what we want to do is support our journalists by providing them with a very wide range of tools that they can use to engage with their audiences and tell the story better."

The Economist, Reuters and the Washington Post already use SiteLife - the Post uses it to power its reader comments and personalisation service.

SiteLife has certain key functionalities that can help online news providers tap into new audiences on social networks , like Facebook, by automatically updating the profiles of readers that leave comments on news stories.

This system is expected to become operational on Facebook in the next few weeks and with OpenSocial by the middle of 2008.

"Undoubtedly, the web landscape in 2007 moved towards people spending more time on social networks," Turcan added.

"It's important for the Guardian that it's also present on those networks and is friendly to those networks because they are places where some of our readers will spend time.

"Working with those [networks] as a means of distribution and as a means of engaging with users is important. Some of the Pluck functionality will help us do that."

Pluck announced last year that Gannett, which publishes USAToday, and Reuters will be the first news providers to use its technology to have their content connected to social networking sites.

"That [announcement] is obviously very consistent with the way we are thinking about our platform and how we take our brand beyond it to other platforms," Turcan added.

As part of the adoption of Pluck's suite of technologies, the Guardian will dump its existing blogging platform - Moveable Type.

The move is part of a more general transfer from existing systems onto the R2 bespoke platform that has been in development at the newspaper for the past 18 months.

The R2 development project is roughly halfway through its incremental overhaul of the newspaper website, Turcan added, and is expected to be completed sometime later this year.