Toyota Adds MySpace-Like Features To Hybrid Owners' Web SiteToyota Adds MySpace-Like Features To Hybrid Owners' Web Site

Toyota's redesigned Web site for hybrid vehicle owners, launched Tuesday, lets owners create profiles of themselves that can include their age group, vehicle color, and reasons they drive a hybrid. Profiles can be searched and viewed in a variety of ways.

"Toyota's more than 600,000 hybrid owners are very passionate about their vehicles and the reasons they drive them," Gregg Benkendorfer, Toyota's national manager of media strategy and digital marketing, said in a prepared statement. "The new community site taps into that excitement by letting users visually represent themselves through graphic art and video."

Toyota's hybrid Web site shows how businesses are taking sites largely geared toward marketing a product or brand and adding features that originated in the noncommercial side of the Internet, including profiles from online communities such as MySpace, wikis, and blogs. A number of automakers and software companies, for example, now have blogs written by executives that invite consumer comment.

Toyota is going with the assumption that since people have very specific reasons for choosing a hybrid (such as concerns about pollution or overreliance on gasoline), they'll be excited to explain them in an online profile. On a community fact page at the site, Toyota talks about the community "moving our planet forward." It also predicts that the community will grow as people share their stories, adding that they might inspire others to purchase hybrid vehicles.