The Last Podcast Opinionated Web 2.0 News and Commentary

MySpace News

So MySpace now has a social news site - and it is bad. Really, really bad. Of course, MySpace features about a million examples of really bad design, so this should not come as a surprise. Besides, I am still not quite sure what this site does but aggregate news from other sources and lay it out in a worse way than Google News.

The layout is so bad, I am surprised any information gets conveyed at all. Given that the site has restricted its width, only one story shows up in full and, if your screen is big enough, maybe the headline of a second story. That’s it. Also, you can rate a story without logging in… seems like a paradise for spammers once they open up user submissions.

The fact that they add awkwardly laid out related posts at the bottom of every item on the homepage seems like a stupid move as well. Besides that, I am not even sure if there is a discussion feature. It wouldn’t be much of a social news site without one, you would think.

Parislemon is skeptical of the success of MySpace News as well:

It might be a novelty at first and every once in a while it could benice to not have to leave a site to get your news, but there are undoubtedly going to be other sites out there that do it better.

The big guys are all swooning pretty excited over the fact that now a new group of people gets introduced to the idea of – well – news.

For some more overage, see: mathewingram.com/work, Download Squad, Epicenter, Screenwerk , Search Engine Journal, Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim, Susan Mernit’s Blog, Techscape, and rexduffdixon.com

Technorati Tags: myspace, myspace news, social news, digg

I’m not swooning over the fact. In fact when I tried to log on this morning, it was a “Figures, they can’t even get this online ON TIME.”

Just wanted to be clear on that. Thanks for the link love!

Rex

Rex, my bad – I changed the text.

I guess I just didn’t quite get the excitement over what is a pretty basic site (and I am not accusing you of that personally, by the way).

[...] 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. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

Myspace news uses frames….the thing has no search? Its UI is really terrible. Best site on the web is still http://www.congoo.com

[...] MySpace News [...]

[...] MySpace News [...]

They try to take out google news but their service not as good