Experience Project Leads Rapidly Growing Social Experience Category : Experience Project brings Social Experience to the web by anonymously connecting like-minded people through shared experiences.

Today Experience Project, the first Social Experience Website, outlined its successful strategy of bringing experience sharing online. With over one million life experiences shared, Experience Project (EP) leads the next generation of the social web. By allowing members to anonymously share and connect with like-minded people in an authentic and emotionally powerful way, EP enables a fundamentally deeper and more meaningful engagement model. In the Experience Project community, who you are is more important than who you know.

SAN FRANCISCO (Business Wire EON) May 13, 2008 -- Today Experience Project, the first Social Experience Website, outlined its successful strategy of bringing experience sharing online. With over one million life experiences shared, Experience Project (EP) leads the next generation of the social web. By allowing members to anonymously share and connect with like-minded people in an authentic and emotionally powerful way, EP enables a fundamentally deeper and more meaningful engagement model. In the Experience Project community, who you are is more important than who you know.

Since we entered our public beta in early 2007, Experience Project has grown into a pervasive platform connecting everyday people in a fun and profound way

Experience Project (EP) provides community members with real stories from everyday people about the topics that matter most to them-- from marital dilemmas to having pets or health problems and raising children. Members sign up under pseudonyms, and contribute their life ‘experiences’—the thoughts, feelings, ideas, issues, hopes, and events that are most important in their lives—unencumbered by worries of revealing their true identity. In this way, EP is the first of a new generation of websites that allow users to both create and consume compelling, authentic content spanning the full spectrum of a person’s life. In contrast to traditional social networking sites, EP members engage through the experiences, ideas, and issues important in their lives, rather than through popularity or appearance, ultimately building new friendships rather than reinforcing pre-existing ones. The site is a hybrid of a “webzine” with user-generated content and an affinity group where people of like minds, experiences, and concerns can find others to connect with.

“Since we entered our public beta in early 2007, Experience Project has grown into a pervasive platform connecting everyday people in a fun and profound way,” notes Armen Berjikly, CEO and founder of Experience Project. “The site becomes a part of our members’ lives, and they often comment on how, despite remaining anonymous, their profiles on EP are the most real representation of themselves, anywhere.”

EP embodies the social and technological evolution around online social connectivity, standing at the nexus of the most important trends shaping the Web: blogs, user-generated content, social networks, and new media. The EP community is composed of unique individuals who can act as readers, authors, editors, and friends all at the same time. Because they remain anonymous, users are free to express all of their passions including deeply personal experiences, in a comfortable place that respects their right to privacy. With consumer and individual privacy under increasing attack, anonymity unleashes the freedom to share all the things that truly matter, facilitating new and meaningful relationships between people who understand each other.

Representing a new engagement model that fosters classifiable affinities and passionate, authentic content, EP leads the evolution of internet marketing by providing a clear pathway to non-disruptive conversational marketing with precision focus. Through “Experience Marketing,” EP offers cascading multiple lifestyle and experience attributes in selecting a focus audience—e.g., a young female Californian mother who is trying to quit smoking. This provides marketers with the ability to hyper-target precisely the people interested in their products while simultaneously balancing the customer’s need for privacy and comfort via EP’s built-in anonymity. In doing so, Experience Marketing is able to deliver on the great promise of online social marketing: To provide greater impact per dollar spent by marketers and to enable unprecedented one-to-one marketing opportunities.

EP was started by Armen Berjikly, a Stanford graduate in computer science. Inspired by a close friend’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis (MS), Berjikly created an online support community for those afflicted by the condition. As the site blossomed, the most powerful tool turned out to be the anonymous chat forum, giving people, often suffering in misunderstood silence, the opportunity to be open among friends who shared and understood their challenges. Recognizing that no one is defined by any one experience and that connecting with people who understand each other through a multitude of shared experiences can be incredibly powerful, Berjikly created Experience Project.

About Experience Project:

Experience Project is the first social experience website where you can anonymously share and connect around the life experiences that are important to you. Explore over one million life experiences, share your own stories anonymously, and find like-minded people who are open, supportive, and just “get it”. Experience Project is the first place on the web where who you are is more important than who you know. Experience Project can be found at http://www.experienceproject.com.