MySpace gets into news aggregation business

Stan Beer
Thursday, 19 April 2007 22:06

Your IT - Home IT

It had to happen sooner or later, MySpace, owned by a news media giant is going into the news aggregation business. The new site at myspace.news.com will spider sites and aggregate news in a similar fashion to Google but will enable visitors to vote on stories to make them popular in a similar fashion to Digg and Netscape.

With more than 100 million visitors to the site, the aptly named MySpace News will have a ready audience and the site hopes to attract new visitors as well as give its existing members a reason to stay on MySpace longer. With news about every topic under the sun, from entertainment to technology, there should be plenty to read about.

However, the foray into the news aggregation business does not come without certain risks. Traditional news wire services have had their problems in the past with Google News displaying excerpts, headlines and thumbnail pics from their stories on its page. Agence France Presse in particular made it clear with a lawsuit that it wasn't interested in Google driving traffic to its site. Google has recently settled with AFP and forged an agreement with the service.

In general, however, Google News is popular with web-based news content publishers as it is a population web destination and drives traffic to their sites. MySpace wants a piece of this action and believes it can do a better job than Google News drawing from a wider variety of sources.

No doubt a large portion of those sources will be News Corporation sites. Whether MySpace News gives perefence to members of its own family of news sources remains to be seen.