Solange taps her hometown and black nostalgia to promote her new album

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By Demi Douglas

Just days before Solange Knowles released her new album, “When I Get Home,” at the beginning of March, she pointed her fans on Twitter to something they probably hadn’t seen in years: the social networking website BlackPlanet.

On her customized BlackPlanet page, which included lyric excerpts, a dossier of images, a lineup of tour dates and a newsletter sign-up, Solange described her fourth studio album as “an exploration of origin,” asking the question “how much of ourselves do we leave at home and how much do we carry with us forever?”

Solange’s new BlackPlanet page quickly drew attention on Twitter, with many wondering if the social site was remerging. BlackPlanet launched in 1999 as a social networking site for African-Americans but has since fallen out of the mainstream. Its founder, Omar Wasow, an assistant politics professor at Princeton University, said that the social network was created to use the internet as a place not only of information, but also of community. BlackPlanet gave African-Americans tools to “make friends, find jobs, date and even get married.”

source: nbcnews.com