It’s a new release, but the debut of MySpace News has generated a great big shrug among tech commentators so far.
Astrology and exchange-traded fund performance both on the front page of MySpace News…if you’ve only ever read Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, you’d probably recognize his hand in the this recently launched website.
Plenty of people are gleefully tweaking News Corp’s powerful patriarch over this site. Wired’s Mike Calore thinks the manager ought to come out to the mound and yank this news pitcher out of the game:
After seeing the news items on the frontdoor, my question is “Wha?”
As they say, Rome (or Digg) wasn’t built in a day, but as a product, MySpace News is what I would politely classify as “undercooked.”
Calore finds plenty of gaps in MySpace News, the most egregious being no search capability. If memory serves, MySpace and Google have a deal in place for advertising and search services, the latter being one that Google has something of a positive reputation in delivering.
Owen Thomas at Business 2.0 found something missing that’s even more surprising than the lack of search:
Offline, his News Corp. (NWS) empire is as self-promoting as always. But MySpace, Murdoch’s Internet jewel, can’t even seem to promote its own services.
No wonder MySpace users keep embedding YouTube videos and inserting Photobucket photos, instead of using MySpace’s own services. Likewise for features like MySpace IM.
MySpace is a market leader in terms of social networking. As Wilson observed, that doesn’t seem to be translating to being a marketing leader for its in-house services.
We suspect the kinds of personal issues frequently found in media companies could be cropping up in MySpace land. It doesn’t appear that everyone is working together, and that frequently means fiefdoms have cropped up in the company, erected by substantial egos.
As Calore noted in his post, Digg’s Kevin Rose has nothing to worry about from MySpace News.
