MySpace News: So Dumb It Just Might Work
That’s just about the only compliment I can think of in regards to the recently-launched MySpace News. Web 2.0 features have been reduced to nothing more than “rate this story.” No comments, no bury, no drag and drop, just rating stuff. A Pligg site has more options, same for a Ning - Digg has nothing to fear (sorry, I just wanted to use Pligg, Ning, and Digg in one sentence).
The scary (or sad) thing is, it’s so brain numbingly reductive, any user could participate (even a chimpanzee), which might be the secret to mainstream success.
Still, there are several things that leave my head scratching.
- If you assume your users are that simplistic, why give them traditional news? I get the feeling most MySpace users aren’t interested in current events.
- Another good idea comes from Eric Berlin over at Online Media Cultist - why not have users rate each other’s MySpace pages?
- MySpace Pages have a ton of blog content. Maybe all of those entries should be included (they’re already on Technorati). Thanks to Blogger’s Blog, you can even suggest your own blog and see how it fares.
- And lastly, I think the whole design could have gone with a more visual look - big, gratuitous pictures along with each of the articles. Many top stories on Digg these days are just articles filled with amusing pictures.
The execution is so simplistic and story quality so scatter-shot, that it’s difficult to take it seriously as a news source. By going with this brain-dead functionality, a more successful attempt might be to brain-dead everything else - namely the content - and produce something more along the lines of Fark or Hot Or Not. How about focusing on bottom-barrel entertainment and gossip content? I could see something like that taking off much more easily with MySpace users than this “news” angle.
My cynical thought is this is an attempt to get MySpace users reading more news and therefore more of the content News Corp. (the parent company) produces. More on this subject at HipMojo.
Additional Reading: Wired News, Rex Dixon, franticindustries
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