Today, they're announcing at Twiistup that they're branching out from hit web content and releasing Umbrella, their consumer platform product for social publishing and audience aggregation, into private beta. Umbrella is designed to bring dead simple publishing and social media distribution to larger than life online personalities, celebrities, entertainers, and independent content creators who want to create a Harper's Globe of their own.
Umbrella's hosted software as a service application is essentially a content management platform a là WordPress, with the simplicity of a Tumblr, and a powerful backend management panel that can pull in external data from integrated social properties. Umbrella also comes replete with OpenID support via Google, and forums for publishers to foster fan participation and interaction. The front-end will look and function like their existing properties, and the backend will bring their publishing platform to consumers.
Entertainers, online producers, and lifestreamers can combine content publishing with social media distribution, meaning they can link their Facebook Fan Page, YouTube Channel, and Twitter account to automatically publish, not just alert, on those platforms as well. So for Facebook and YouTube, full content from the original posts would be pushed out to those platforms as well, and still give publishers the ability to track content performance.
Essentially, Umbrella is a premium CMS targeted to users with a large online audience interested in not only maintaining ownership of their audience, but also connecting with them through distributed social channels. As such, Umbrella users will be able to tap into extensive user data and have access, depending on users' privacy settings, to fan email addresses and demographics. The management panel will also pull in data from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to give users a full picture of their reach and penetration.