• by Laurie Sullivan , September 9, 2009

Demand Media built new capabilities on top of its Pluck 4 platform, bringing to market Wednesday an application server that integrates social media.

Pluck 4, a software as a service (SaaS) tool, allows developers, graphic designers, and agencies to build out Web sites with social media such as product reviews, recommendations, or product, still and video photo pages. The application now features management tools, social data modeling, custom applications, and more.

The series of "under-the-cover technologies" required for the application server framework includes a set of application programming interfaces (APIs). Company Web sites or clients making requests using PHP, C#, or JavaScript, among others, get back XML, JSON, RSS feeds or complete application functionality in XHTML. It enables developers to use one universal approach through a RESTful API that connects with browsers or servers for search features to build out the social media platform.

The ability to search and discover content on engines such as Google and Bing was a top consideration when building out the platform, says Steve Semelsberger, senior vice president and general manager at Pluck, a Demand Media company.

"If I decide to make comments searchable, because it will help improve PageRank with Google and inbound direct traffic from search engines, I can use RESTful techniques when programming the content, so comments are crawlable and searchable by engines like Google," Semelsberger says.

The Pluck 4 Comments provides features such as user highlights, threading, scores, friend filters and social bridging. It allows site visitors to post product reviews that appear on the merchant's Web site, as well as the consumer's Twitter and Facebook pages.

Matthew Lees, vice president and analyst at Patricia Seybold Group, says it's a growing trend for companies to allow consumers to post comments on their blog, and share them as posts on a variety of sites with a click of a button. "It's about integrating communities, but also integration with products, such as Quicken, CRM tools, and other business applications," he says.

Lees says adding APIs, widgets and JavaScript code allows companies to create two-way conversations through text threads, still photos and videos. Sometimes the connections link to outside communities, from Web sites that may support similar services to social communities.

Pluck software services integrate more than 400 digital destinations hosted by companies, such as NFL, USA Today, Kraft and Lowe's. It delivers more than 3 billion social media interactions each month.