MySpace News Beta – A Threat to Digg?
Myspace News, the news aggregator rumoured to be a serious threat to Digg, was launched in beta yesterday. I’ve seen some rumors and rumblings on the Web about how Myspace news was going to shoot down Digg before its launch to chatter now to the effect of “actually, their rating systems are pretty different, so they’re not competing after all.” And to that, I have to disagree.
Myspace can be a royal pain in the ass as any user can tell you. It kind of rubbed me the wrong way that they were pushing into yet another new project without fixing their neverending tech issues first. But I have to say, after poking around the beta site a bit, it’s looking like they may have actually done something right. I guess that’s the benefit of being owned by a major news media company.
People are saying they don’t see a threat to sites like Digg now, because the rating system is a little different… users rate stories on a five star scale as opposed to simply “voting” for an article if they think it’s worth promoting to the homepage. I think those people are either full of crap, incredibly naive, or just webmasters upset that they can’t abuse this new system as easily.
Now, I only spent a few minutes looking over the new Myspace News site, so feel free to correct me if I’m getting something wrong. The stories on Myspace News are still voted from category pages to the home page by users. The difference is that you can’t just randomly submit your individual stories or blog posts, hoping to manipulate the system with your Digg buddies to get a huge influx of traffic when your story hits the homepage. Instead, you can suggest “sources,” including blogs, and if they meet certain quality requirements they can be added to the approprate category on Myspace News. So how does Myspace News decide which sites to include as sources? Here’s what they say about it on the site:
“We’re looking for the best from a variety of categories. Some factors include: Is this source topical? Do they publish regularly? Is there a core audience? Do other news sources link to this site?”
As for the rating system, unlike what I’ve seen a few bloggers saying already, it’s not just about rating a story like you’d rate a movie or album or some other product with a quality rating. If anything, it’s Digg a few years in the future, when they finally pull in the reins and give the power back to users instead of their “power groups.” Rather than being a rating system more like Amazon’s, Myspace News seems to be a nice little hybrid of the two. They track not only that star rating for quality, but also the number of votes for each news story. It’s a nice system from the looks of it… not only can you simply give a story a yea or nay, but offer a sliding scale rating letting other viewers know at a glance whether or not the story is actually worth reading. After all of the time we’ve had news aggregators on these social media sites, we might finally have one that actually represents the views of the users.
While Digg will continue to hold the top spot with the webmaster audience, at least for now (and b/c of the ease of abuse and self-promotion), Myspace News has a chance to take the top spot in the ranks of honest news aggregators interested in offering the most interesting, and most important stories to readers, and they have a nice little userbase to help get them in the right direction. Of course, we’ve seen Myspace launch new features and projects before just to have them fade into the huge mishmash that is Myspace, so let’s see if they’ve got their act together this time to give a project the treatment it deserves.
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