MySpace News: What, no personalisation?
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 25 April 2007 at 12:57
Tags: Digg, MySpace, Reddit
As was long expected (by those who read the right blogs), the social networking behemoth MySpace last week launched a news aggregation service, MySpace News. But nobody developing news aggregation or recommendation sites will be quaking in their boots just yet.
As it stands a week after launch, MySpace News is an enormous missed opportunity. The service, which is based on the news aggregator NewRoo, certainly won’t win any awards for navigation in online news design.
With an enormous banner advertisement at the top, even users of large screens will see only a story or two on the front page. Its primary category navigation is hidden away beneath another huge advertisement. There is no obvious way to search for news other than that on the page.
MySpace News also allows users to rank the news stories. But, unlike the binary simplicity of Digg and Reddit, MySpace News uses an awkward scale of 1 to 5. What’s worse, few users seem to have discovered how to use these tools. Judging by the handful of votes on
even the top stories, MySpace’s 100 million users certainly aren’t streaming to their latest news portal.
The whole news site seems like a bit of a ghost town – which is something of a flaw for a site that seeks to harness the “wisdom of crowds”. But that may yet change if and when there is more integration between MySpace News and the rest of the vast site.
The lack of integration seems to be the site’s major flaw and a massive missed opportunity. MySpace is sitting on a huge amount of statistical data about how its 100 million users are connected to one another.
If this social networking data could be brought to bear on story selection, MySpace News could provide an interesting new twist to news personalisation.
In spite of the appearance of democratic story-selection, the great weakness of the existing social news recommendation sites is their voting algorithms, which mean the stories appearing on their front pages are dominated by a tiny elite of unrepresentative alpha users.
Unlike many other so-called participatory media sites, MySpace users generate useful information about themselves merely by forging the links that are a social networking site’s bread and butter.
Armed with its social-networking data, MySpace could, in theory at least, attempt to achieve innovative forms of news personalisation. MySpace’s voting algorithm, could, for example, give greater weight to articles voted on by the reader’s MySpace friends, on the assumption
that acquaintances are likely to share interests.
MySpace News, like any good website these days, is in “beta” testing mode, and has been soliciting feedback for improvement. One hopes someone is paying attention.
