The internet goes Gaga as pop star’s own social network opens to public

10 Jul 2012

Having spent months as an invite-only beta, Lady Gaga’s social network LitleMonsters.com is now open for all to register, inviting a new wave of celebrity-centred social media.

LittleMonsters.com bills itself as ‘a community full of art, acceptance, monsters and Gaga’, but what will strike any internet devotee about the site is the fact it has borrowed key elements from the web’s biggest social networks and amalgamated them into one Gaga-filled world.

The site is the first in a line of communities to be launched by creative start-up Backplane this year, and, like Gaga herself, LittleMonsters.com is very well designed.

The best of the web gone Gaga

In essence, LittleMonsters.com is like a combination of the best bits from all social networks, only all of it is Gaga-fied.

Posts look a lot like Pinterest’s pins, while an up-voting and down-voting system is reminiscent of Reddit. The Discuss section is similar to any old forum, while the chat function, with its user-generated ‘rooms’, harks back to the early days of internet chat, with avatars and speech bubbles. This also comes with a handy translate tool, helping ‘monsters’ worldwide to converse.

The News feed aggregates news stories about the pop star from sites around the world and an Events section lets users join and purchase tickets to Gaga’s gigs.

User profiles can be followed by becoming a fan (remember when you would ‘Become a fan’ on Facebook?), while a sidebar lets users tag their profile blog-style with interests, music, skills and related websites.

Profile pages also come with a comment stream specifically for that user and not just an individual post, as well as a Questions section, where users answer randomly generated questions about Gaga and Gaga-related things if nothing more than to populate their profiles with content.

The site’s members, the little monsters themselves, are asked to follow the Monster Code, a set of guidelines for the community asking that members are respectful, tolerant and safe.

Is there a future for celebrity-focused social networks?

As a social network, LittleMonsters.com appears to have gotten a lot of things right, but what’s most striking about the site is its sheer focus. Everything is Gaga-related, even down to the memes being shared, and the community of little monsters appear to be lapping it up.

As celebrities are becoming more social and web-present – most of them via easy routes like Twitter and Facebook, but also many with their own blogs – could Lady Gaga be one step ahead in how fans can now connect with their idols online?

Whatever your opinion of the divisive pop star, she certainly is forward-thinking.

Elaine Burke is the host of For Tech’s Sake, a co-production from Silicon Republic and The HeadStuff Podcast Network. She was previously the editor of Silicon Republic.

editorial@siliconrepublic.com