Sitting in front of a monitor after a morning cup of coffee, I decided MySpace News would be the first website I visit for the day. My reasoning for this was simple; 160 million MySpace members given the ability to determine the best news on the Internet over the last 24 hours certainly must equate to a successful and interesting news site. I was grossly disappointed.

Beta or not, after 24 hours you would, at the very least, expect some good content on the front page. A large banner sat before me, reading, “Top News.”

I expected to see today’s stories such as ”a new attack for routers and cell phones” or “Hewlett-Packard still leading Dell in PCs.” But quite possibly I’ve underestimated the MySpace crowd. Maybe MySpace News would have a juvenile twist with titles about how Wii is beating the PS3 or why the Xbox 360 Elite isn’t elite.

Instead, I get blog entries; the first on the list entitled ‘Upcoming.org updated’ which is some Joe gabbling about a new website design. Unfortunately, it took only a single vote for it to reach the front page as ‘top news.’

As I’m no expert in the subject, it would seem to me, with front page stories having no more than a maximum of 5 votes, that simply no one is participating.

Given any other site, I would expect no more. But MySpace? Surely more than a handful of people should be participating other than Hotchik69 and LuvULongTym.

MySpace News was way past second chances at this point. But for the sake of my own interests, thinking that maybe MySpace aggregated content from different topics to provide a ‘mix’ of news, I decided to select a few categories that spark my own interests.

Nearly every category had nonsense stories with zero votes; the ones that did had 1-2 votes, and they were still meaningless. At this point, simply the amusement of being the only one a ‘big name’ news site was enough to keep me there. I decided to run an experiment.

After obtaining a MySpace username and password from one of my buddies, I signed on, went back to MySpace News, and selected the category ‘Web 2.0.’  I was able to find a not-so-interesting yet poorly placed article on journalism.

The rating system was based on 5 adolescent phrases: hated it, didn’t like it, liked it, really liked it, and loved it. Of course, I loved it.

Heading back to the ‘Front Page,’ where all the popular news stories reside, I was looking for the journalism story I just voted up. After what seemed to be nearly 5 minutes of refreshing the page, there it was in bold black letters before my eyes; I played my part in MySpace News.

But I must give credit where credit is due; I simply can’t state that no one is participating. After a quick visit to MySpace news last night to check the progress of the launch, I came across something very interesting.

Apparently, some time Thursday, a few Diggers decided it would be fun to vote up a story that was actually bashing MySpace News. It had the highest number of votes I’ve seen on the site since the new service was set in motion, Twenty.

The story, “Hands-on with MySpace News: far from a Digg killer,” from Webware.com, just another site in the CNET network, can be seen below, occupying the top spot in MySpace News.

One hour later, the most popular story on MySpace News, and probably the only one actually worthy of being called ‘news’ had disappeared.

Related:

Myspace to launch developer platform February 5th

Sony’s PS3 beats Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in reliability

MySpace Music streams over a billion tracks in a few short days

MySpace gets latin fever

MySpace karaoke, the new feature from hell

Entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 6:02 am under Uncategorized.  Print This Post

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