MySpace Digg clone a squandered opportunity

So, MySpace News is finally here, as predicted earlier today by the usual luminaries (and a month ago or so too by Terry Heaton, though with admittedly less precision).

As I expected, by merely cloning Digg MySpace has squandered the opportunity to leverage its unique and defensible advantage - the tens of millions of hosted blogs that talk every day about the news and could could be mined to power a MySpace-based pagerank system for news stories.

MySpace is so large it could effectively operate as a self-contained sub-Internet, using its users' daily writings to power a news aggregation tool (stories most linked-to from within a MySpace blog), citizen-journalism (any post tagged by the writer as "news", suitably filtered), even a radio station along the lines recently developed as Hype Radio (HT: Fred Wilson). But MySpace does none of that - it just copies a successful, existing model across into its own space and asks its legions of users to retag the news stories they're doubtless already referencing in their Myspace blogs.

The saddest thing is, with its vast number of users to tap, even something this unimaginative can hardly fail.

Comments

[Friendly Ghost]

It's because they just don't trust their audience.

NewPR has gone a similar way. It began as a superb idea, a digg-alike for PR, voted for by PR professionals. Recently it lost its nerve and introduced moderation. I don't know what form that moderation takes but I daresay it includes an element of human involvement and immediately the many-to-many 'democratic' model is shattered.

Like digg and like any massively interactive site - indeed like democracy itself I guess - NewPR and MySpace just need to trust their populations.