Apr

20

After the (brief) Honeymoon: MySpace News Still Sucks

April 20, 2007 |

I am glad to see I am not the only one who thinks MySpace News is a waste of bits.

Pete Cashmore lists his reasons:

1. Why no comments?
2. Needs widgets, or other integration with profiles.
3. Search?
4 . Spam. Maybe I’m being only harsh about what constitutes spam, but I found some items that were hardly news. Like, for instance, this “gadget blog“, which is really just a series of affiliate links.
5. The site is dead, and will remain dead until they link to it from elsewhere on MySpace. Top stories only have a few votes, and the only people who know about it are tech bloggers. Planning to add a navigation link once the kinks are ironed out? The problem there is that a preponderance of tech geeks could alienate the MySpace
demographic. Any genuine MySpace user hitting NooZ, the original “Digg for MySpace”, was automatically scared off by the lack of appealing stories.

Couldn’t agree more. Polling my own students, it seems MySpace has peaked anyway. They all use facebook now.

Also, as DeepJiveInterests points out, given MySpace’s huge user base, how come nobody is using MySpace News?

No, I don’ t mean reading the “news” that’s there. I mean, actually voting on the news? Because as I check this out, all of the news items are in the single digits. The kind of bushleague activity I would expect on a pagerank zero Digg / Netscape / Reddit clone running Pligg kind of numbers — not with one of the most highly trafficked properties on the web. You’d think that a sliver of spillover from their main page would drive usage of this frankenstein of a social “experiment” through the roof.

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