Lady Gaga Launches Social Media Platform, LittleMonsters.com

Pop superstar Lady Gaga's social media platform, LittleMonsters.com, officially went live Tuesday after months of beta testing.

Gaga, the most popular person on Twitter with more than 26 million followers, has put together a social media platform that acts like a mashup of Facebook, Pinterest and Reddit. The site is open to anyone who is willing to connect through their Facebook or Twitter account, if they provide a valid email address.

The platform was built by Backplane, a startup that raised $5 million in its initial capital search, and is meant to allow people to build a network around a specific interest. For LittleMonsters.com, it is built around Lady Gaga and related topics, but Mashable reports that the company is also planning to build networks for Nike, American Idol creator Simon Fuller, and others.

Littlemonsters will likely be populated by Gaga fanatics, but works as a good look into what Backplane is trying to accomplish. It is similar to Pinterest in some of the picture content that is posted, but also has a major Reddit component in that it allows for users to vote up or down on the content they come across. Its Facebook slice comes from the multilingual chat feature -- think Facebook chat -- though the company's CEO stressed that it isn't a direct competitor with the world's top social media company.

"We love Facebook - it's a very powerful tool," Backplane CEO Matt Michelsen told Mashable. "This is not a product meant to destroy or compete with Facebook. It's a different purpose."

The site is being billed as a place to "share your passion and creativity in a community full of art, acceptance, monsters and Gaga."

Given Gaga's massive social media reach, don't be surprised to see this website bring in hordes of fans in a hurry.