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MySpace News, YourSpace news

Apr 19th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment

As reported by several sources, including Reuters and Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch (where the notion of an “exclusive” gets some debate in the comments section), MySpace has launched its widely-rumoured Digg-alicious news service, although Mike said that it would go live at 7 a.m. and all I get is a login prompt when I go there. Was the site not quite ready for prime-time perhaps? (Update at 12:05 EST — it is now live).

In any case, this new service from the geniuses at Fox Interactive Media (which owns MySpace and is a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s media and entertainment behemoth News Corp.) was reported to be coming in March, according to Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog. The service will pull in news from RSS feeds — although News Corp. says it will not favour its own services and newspapers — and users can also submit stories, and then vote on them. Apparently news services will be able to opt out and not have their articles displayed, according to News Corp.

Despite the fact that most people who go to such “user-generated” media sites don’t actually submit or perhaps even vote on stories, as Seamus McCauley discusses here (based on a new Hitwise survey), I still think this kind of thing could turn out to be very powerful, and that MySpace is smart to do it. MG Siegler at Parislemon says he is skeptical, and Seamus says that it is a missed opportunity, while The Last Podcast says it is just plain bad.

The questions in my mind are these: What happens to Jason Calacanis’s Digg-ified Netscape? Or to Digg itself for that matter, which has been trying to branch out into non-tech news but without much success (as far as I can tell)? With 100 million users, MySpace has 100 times the audience that Digg has. Better yet, how long until Google News decides to add a user voting system? Now that would be fascinating.

Will News take over MySpace News?

Mar 9th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment

From Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog comes word that MySpace — the 800-pound gorilla of social networking — will soon be launching a Digg-style news aggregation service of some kind. Is that a good thing? It’s certainly interesting, and I would expect Digg to be worried about the prospect. Whether it’s actually something worthwhile depends on how it is handled.

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch raises an interesting point, which is that having its own “social news” feature connected to the gazillions of people who belong to MySpace (even if those gazillions aren’t quite as large as the service would like us to believe, thanks to the multiple-account problem) could give News Corp. lots of ideas about pushing its news content into such an aggregator, giving it priority of some kind, etc. In my view, that would be bad. On the other hand, News Corp. could use the social aspect of such a service to get a read on what a large audience is interested in, and use that to inform the rest of its media operations, which would be smart.

Will News Corp. use its MySpace News as a kind of jungle drum, to pick up stories that might be under the radar? Or will it just be another Digg-style echo chamber where the uncouth hordes and flash crowds can congregate and spin stories into hysterical overkill? Should be interesting to watch. For more, see Pete Cashmore at Mashable and Seamus McCauley at Virtual Economics.

Update:

Joe Duck says that he expects MySpace to fail miserably. He says that “social news networks like Digg and Netscape are pretty bad for all but tech and quirky news because they generally fail to analyze or treat significant stories with much if any respect.” I would have to agree there, but then I’m a news junkie from the old school News Corp. is also trying to get other video content owners to bring their stuff to MySpace.