The social networking site, Myspace, is offering a new service to its users allowing them to rate popular news stories around the web in a “Digg-like” manner. Myspace, owned by News Corp., is hoping to attract a wider audience with MySpace News while increasing advertising revenue. The new service uses an algorithm to crawl the web, similar to the way Google News obtains stories, and collects the most popular and current topics to display on its News page.
Users who visit MySpace News will initially be shown the top news stories; each story is ordered by the number of votes given to it by the community. Alternatively, users can select stories within a given topic such as TV, finance, web rumor, gadgets, gaming, etc,…
The term “Digg-like” is often used when a site allows its members to vote up or vote down particular items in a list of content. This method has proved to be very successful, as no one knows what people want better than the people themselves. Although, unlike Digg, stories will not submitted by users; they will simply be able to vote up stories collected by Myspace.
Myspace News will also have a significant boost from its over 160 million members which accounted for 4% of all website visits earlier in the year.
“It’s a great marriage between technology and letting the users pick and rate the stories,” said Myspace cofounder, Tom Anderson, while noting that Myspace members will ultimately determine the quality of MySpace News. “We’re the editorial engine driving our news service,” said Tom, in a press release.
However, if the people determine what content is relevant, it raises the question as to what MySpace members actually deem to be good news. (As I write this, the headline “Top 5 sources for glitter text” comes to mind.)
A taste of adolescence has already been added with the voting system, which is based on a scale of 1 to 5: hated it, didn’t like it, liked it, really liked it, and loved it.
But MySpace is changing, and this new service could be an attempt to cater to the new audience. Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix, “the demographic composition of MySpace.com has changed considerably. Last year half of the site’s visitors were at least 25 years old, while today more than two-thirds of MySpace visitors are age 25 or older.”
An analysis of Myspace by comScore in late 2006 suggests that over half of MySpace’s visitors are of age 35 and older, leaving the social networking site to have the broadest appeal across all age ranges.
This new service is, in part, aimed at keeping MySpace members coming back more frequently and staying online for a longer duration. Currently, MySpace users sign-on, on average, 19 times per month and spend roughly 10 minutes per visit in the US, according to comScore.
MySpace News was created using technology from Newroo, a company purchased by MySpace parent News Corp. last year. “Many advertisers have expressed interest in the service, which allows them to target the MySpace community in a more direct way,” said Brian Norgard, co-founder of Newroo.
The service is to draw from over 4,500 Online news publishers, in which they will be given the choice to have their news feed removed from MySpace News. Ironically, the news about ‘MySpace News’ has made the front page.
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