It's been a month (since July 10th, to be exact) when a social youthquake tremor rumbled under the tweets and Facebook posts of the olds when Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters social network opened its doors to the public.

A raucous riot of visual updates from Gaga's legions of fans — with shades of Ticketmaster, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr and Facebook thrown in for good measure — the highly anticipated site defines the next iteration of fan-based social networking. Two weeks after launch, on July 25th, the site passed a quarter of a million users.

Powered by the Backplane, it was engineered by Gaga’s manager, Troy Carter, who's also a cofounder of Backplane. “The goal of Little Monsters and Backplane is to unite people around affinities, interests and movements,” said Matt Michelsen, co-founder and CEO. And to keep out all those aforementioned old-timers cluttering up Facebook and Twitter and ruining the party for fishnetizens who worship at the altar of Gaga and nonconformity.Continue reading...

Back in June we noted that Lady Gaga had bought a 20% stake in The Backplane, joining Google chairman Eric Schmidt in supporting the nascent developer of social networking tools for groups ranging from "Girl Scout troops to celebrity fanclubs."

Naturally, Gaga's legions of fans (known as Little Monsters) would be the first to get their own social network powered by The Backplane — called, of course, LittleMonsters.com (which is now accepting pre-launch registrations).

It's getting closer to launch, with The Backplane last week tweeting a photo of the performer meeting with Backplane staffers (and posting it on Facebook), showing the site's logo in the background — the universal "paws up" monster claw used by her legions of fans.Continue reading...