As promised months ago when we flipped the site from a short-lived Flash experience back to an HTML platform, we’ve been constantly working on new MTV.com features and improvements. The smaller stuff has been rolling out quite regularly, but now we’re ready to test something a bit bigger.

Today we took the first step towards implementing community features with the launch of beta.mtv.com. Admittedly, it’s a baby step: mostly it’s commenting and the ability to rate content (video, photo, articles). But creating the back end for this lays the foundation for other features that comprise most online communities (user profiles, customization, messaging, etc.) that we will unveil in the coming months.

We have also made it possible for you to snag our music video clips and post them to your MySpace page or blog. The video embed codes sit to the left of our music videos.

Because we want to get it right before going public, we’ve got the beta launch. We invited people who previously registered with MTV.com to take part and asked them to invite their friends. But you’re not left out, either. Interested MTV Labs users are invited to join in, too, by clicking here.

So, please, kick the tires a bit for us. Rate music videos new and old, sound off on a news article and engage other beta testers in conversation. And let us know the good and the bad of how it’s working by leaving a comment here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 4:10 pm and is filed under community, development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.