Who needs editors when you can tap the collective wisdom of a few random strangers?
Last month, it was USA Today adding social features to its news; today, it’s MySpace adding news to its social features. The popular online hangout today launched MySpace News, where the presentation is based on user rankings of content that the site pulls in from trusted news sources. Letting users submit their own finds, a la Digg, Reddit and others, may come later.
Whether this has any appeal for you depends largely on whether you spend much time on MySpace and whether you happen to share the interests of the site’s youthful demographic. Fox Interactive Group, owner of MySpace, expects that in the absence of any huge news story, the top of the listings will be dominated by entertainment, gossip and oddities. But more value might be found among the 300 subcategories. “It’s extremely hard [on other sites] to find the person saying the most interesting thing on something narrow, like USC football,” said Brian Norgard, who, with Dan Gould, created NewRoo, acquired by MySpace for this technology.
MySpace News faces the challenges of any socially driven feature, like the small percentage of readers who actually participate on participatory sites, and the interest of MySpace socializers in reading and rating news is open to question. Further, by priming the pump with links and blurbs from news sites, MySpace could end up in the same kind of tussles with content producers that Google News has. But with 100 million members, MySpace has the raw material from which to build an active news site, even if, as Seamus McCauley contends, it’s missing a chance to do something truly novel.
