Sugar Magazine launches Social Bookmarking Site for Teens

UK teen mag Sugar has launched a new social boomarking tool for teenage girls called Sugarscape. Sitting alongside its already existing sugarmagazine.co.uk, the new site, currently in beta, is aiming to be an aggregator of cool gossip, music, quizzes and ‘stuff’ linked to by the sugar team and the readers themselves.

Users can register and download the sugarscape toolbar, then customise their personal page or ‘scape’, and add anything they find on the web by ‘sugaring’ things with comments and opinions. Involving more of a networking aspect than other bookmarking tools, ‘scapers’ can enhance their status by earning points for their actions – where they can either ‘sugar’ things they like, ‘shove’ things they hate, or ‘share’ things with their friends, and in a kinder version of the facebook poke can ‘squeeze’ their friends- sending a virtual hug that comes with the added bonus of 10 extra points. The site also encourages users to import all existing Bebo, MySpace and YouTube profiles to sugarscape, aiming to create a one-stop social networking experience.

In the dwindling sales of teen mags, Sugar is still standing strong as market leader (average circulation during the January-June 2007 period of 187,059 copies, which is down 6.6% on 2006, versus the 43.5% sales drop of the nearest competitor, Panini’s Bliss which fell to 120,506 copies) and with this site clearly hopes to enhance its identity as a brand that understands teenage girls.

via Brand Republic