MySpace News: Will That Bird Fly?
TechCrunch reports that MySpace News, which is to be a Google News/social news hybrid for the social networking set, is expected to go live today (as of this writing at 8 am PST, it still has a password-protected wall up).
There are two broad avenues of thought when pondering a MySpace News site. The first has to do with creating a news portal/social news hybrid, and the second has to do with how that will fly with the MySpace hordes.
As to the first, I find the notion of creating what will be the first large-scale publisher-friendly social news site to be intriguing. Most current social news sites – particularly Digg and Netscape – treasure the notion that the community rules. Therefore, publishers looking to expose their stories and find new audiences find themselves in a somewhat murky position. Essentially, they are disincentivized from actively submitting their own stories and involving the loyal members of their communities in actively participating on social news sites.
Mike Arrington notes that MySpace News will “pull news items from a number of trusted sources” but that at some point “we can probably expect users to be able to submit news items directly.” This is a strong model, and I’m curious to see how it works in practice. Site members then have the ability to both vote for and rank stories (from 1-5), with the most popular being elevated to the top of one of 25 main categories.
This latter bit seems iffier to me. The strength of the social news experience is its simplicity. Clicking “digg it” and seeing your vote instantly recorded is simple, easy, and satisfying. Adding a layer of complexity on top of that may not be well advised.
The second question is whether or not MySpace users are interested in a news site at all, let alone a community-run one. Personally, I think it would be really fun to see a MySpace (or any large social networking or community site) do an in-house social news site. In other words, let people submit and vote for profiles themselves, and then do the same for MySpace blog posts, uploaded videos, and pictures. This seems to me to strike to the core of what the social networking experience is: self-promotion, self-expression, and popularity contests.
parislemon agrees, writing, “…does anyone who frequents MySpace really want to go there to vote on news stories?” Meanwhile, Techscape ponders what the Digg community’s reaction will be. I’m guessing it will be none too friendly!
