Lycos is launching Planet, a "social interaction platform" with which users can create a mini-site - their own "planet" - and add blogs, upload photos and create slide shows with animated special effects and music, reports ClickZ. The U.S. version is being launched on Lycos's Angelfire community of some 10 million teens and young adults. Planet will also be offered to Lycos's 12 million Tripod users.

Plans for the near term do not include advertising on the planets, but in the future there may be sponsored planets or ads placed in planets with the owner's permission.

Planet is the first product to support Lycos's effort to become a destination for content creators and content consumers.

The Lycos search function will remain, but will support the building, distributing and consuming of content, some of which will be user-generated; some will be created by Lycos, and some will be from partner record labels, book publishers and movie studios.