Plenty Of Space At MySpace News

from the The-MySpace-News-Blues dept

The success of Digg has prompted a lot of copycat attempts, such as the revamped Netscape, which took a lot of flack at the time the site was launched. Since then, however, the model has been replicated so many times that nobody even bother to notice. Last month, MySpace launched its own Digg clone in the hopes that its users would be interested in social news the same way they’re interested in social networking. Turns out, things don’t translate so well. As Mike Arrington points out, MySpace News is a bit of a ghost town, as stories can rise to the top with just one or two votes. Although the site is young, it seems that MySpace users are much more interested in discovering bands and people to date than they are discussing the news. The point is that even if a company has a lot of users, there’s no surefire way of building a certain kind of community or getting them to use a site in a specific way.


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Comments on “Plenty Of Space At MySpace News”

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7 Comments
Spud (user link) says:

This article hits the nail on the head. I really don’t think MySpace users are interested in reading the news while they are at MySpace. They are there for other reasons such as the music and there friends. I’m sure MySpace users actually want to escape the “real world” news so they won’t go looking for it while at MySpace. I can see MySpace news dieing eventually.

nonuser says:

Ries & Trout

This phenomenom was explained well by Ries & Trout in their book “Positioning”, published decades ago. Consumers learn to associate a product category with one or two market leaders, which is great for those businesses, but there’s a catch… the same mental inertia that protects them from being easily dislodged by competitors also prevents them from moving into a much different space and dominating that as well.

pete says:

hah!

What are you talking about? 14-year olds are just as active in today’s news as adults. In fact, little Suzy down the road just sold some of her stocks because she fears recession; at least in her mind, with the money she’ll make now, she can still afford the HCl Swimming Barbie AND Tae Kwon Do Barbie with karate slapping action.

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