With SHOWTIME’s acclaimed drama The L Word signing up as a first customer, The Electric Sheep Company (ESC) today announced WebFlock, a new private-label virtual world application for improved online social interaction, media consumption and multi-player casual game-play.

The Electric Sheep Company and The L Word first innovated together in 2007 with the Emmy Award-winning “L Word in Second Life” online community. That virtual experience won rave reviews and deep fan participation, but faced barriers to entry.

“The Second Life project was a success, but was only accessible to a small portion of our online audience,” says Rob Hayes, Senior Vice President and General Manager Showtime Digital Media. “We are excited to bring the benefits of virtual worlds, such as community empowerment, to a Web-sized audience.”

“We have spent years creating virtual experiences for media companies and brands, and have struggled to match available technology with the needs of our clients,” says Sibley Verbeck, CEO of ESC. “That struggle led us to create WebFlock, and we are thrilled to work with SHOWTIME again as one of our first customers for the product.”

WebFlock is designed to solve many of the challenges faced by branded consumer-facing virtual worlds, where results have been stymied by accessibility and usability problems. WebFlock balances the need for visually rich social, media, and gaming spaces, with the requirements of mainstream audiences.

Key application features include:

Private-labeled

Every WebFlock implementation is separate and customizable, which gives companies the ability to control such things as user registration, quality (and safety) of art content, monetization including advertising or micro-transactions, integration to other Web content or profile systems, and overall user experience.

Flash-based

The front-end is built entirely in Flash, which is already installed on 98% of the world’s Web browsers. ESC made the critical decision to work with Flash because mainstream users are reluctant to download software, whether desktop applications or custom browser plug-ins.

Out-of-the-box feature set

The core WebFlock application includes key virtual world features, such as chat filtering and muting, emotes, load-balancing for massive scalability, and Web-based metrics to be able to track usage.

Highly extendable

WebFlock can be customized with unique avatars, 3D spaces, and new interactivity such as casual games or scripted objects. It can also be integrated to a company’s existing art or game content, registration systems and other Web applications. WebFlock can reside on a single Web page or be syndicated across the Web on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Software-as-a-Service

ESC charges a monthly application services fee based on concurrent users, which covers access to the software, hosting, technical support and maintenance. Customization services, such as art creation, game design, or systems integration, are priced separately.