Myspace news service will fail

Myspace is going to launch a social news service. I think this doomed to failure if the reason (as reported by the NY Post) they plan to introduce the feature is ‘official’.

MySpace’s news aggregator service is intended to keep users on the site instead of having them go to other places on the Web to get gossip, news and sports stories.

The whole point of the web’s fundamental accessibility is that users are one click away from another potentially competing site. You’ll only win them if you have a compelling reason to stay. And I don’t think a Digg copy gives you that.

There are other problems. Myspace’s current brand image doesn’t make me associate it with trust. Zoneil Maharaj agrees:

Since users (see: teenagers) will be able to rank and share news, all the news service will do is round up junk about Paris Hilton and Baldylocks Britney. But must MySpace have a hand in everything?

And given the current hostility to Google News, to what extent will news content’s owners allow Myspace to link to their stories.

By-the-by, I use a combination of news aggregators and blogs (and blog monitoring is becoming more and more a focus for me) but Google News is easy to use, I enjoy happening across info in the (recently CondeNast purchased) Reddit.

Also of note, because it’s one of the few which employs real humans to edit stories, is the relaunched Netscape as a news site. Shame the design is so awful.