The Early Reviews of MySpace News Are In, And They Ain't So Scorching
It’s fascinating in many ways that the world’s most popular social networking site just rolled out a social news (community votes for stories, and the most popular bubble up to the top or front page for maximum exposure) platform, which would presumably compete with the likes of Digg, Netscape, and Reddit. (Check out the new MySpace News here.)
The early reviews are… not so scorching, however.
Mashable ain’t beating ’round no bushes: “MySpace News… Kinda Sucks.” There’s constructive criticism to back up this assessment, including the new site’s lack of integration with the rest of MySpace. One would think that leveraging the power of millions of registered users and their profiles would be a no brainer. Other not so good things: lack of comments, search, and widgets, and an early surplus of spam. Pete Cashmore ends by saying, “So far, MySpace has failed to push that huge audience to its own services (think: MySpace IM, MySpace Video, fact that photo hosting is mainly done by Photobucket etc).”
Meanwhile, Wired’s Compiler says that “MySpace News Should Be Benched.” The main indictment here is that a mix of weak stories (”Donkey Testifies in Dallas Noise Complaint Trial”) is paired with very low vote totals making the front page. In the biz we call this the “ghost town effect.” People like to hang out on sites where there’s lots of action going on, and lots of other people.
(That’s why bloggers love comments! Hint, hint… 
And Josh Lowensohn of Webware states that MySpace News is “Far From A Digg Killer.” Josh seems to sum up the consensus of many in stating that, “In other words, almost all the features that make Digg worth coming back to are missing from MySpace News.”
On the plus side, Bloggers Blog likes MySpace News “because of its heavy focus on blogs for news.”
I’ll repeat my argument that I began laying out yesterday: instead of going after the news market, why doesn’t MySpace News base its submit-and-vote system on MySpace content itself? MySpace is a massive online ecosphere, what with millions of profiles, many thousands of bands, umpteen photos and videos and even blog entries uploaded every day, etc.
MySpace is MySpace because it’s a bastion of self-marketing and networking. If you tied a social news engine directly into this core competency, I believe there would be a much greater chance for success than what this current diluted version of Digg or Netscape appears to be.
In other words, every time a MySpace user uploads a video there should be a question that asks, “Submit to MySpace News?” And right there you’re creating tremendous interest in fueling the ever thirsty social news engine and at the same time compelling people to submit their self-promotional wares and check out what other people are doing.
This makes all kinds of sense to me, and I’m surprised that I haven’t seen anyone else mention it yet.
