• Reuters, Thursday, April 19, 2007 11 AM

MySpace is entering the news aggregation business-and why not? The service, called MySpace News, is a cross between Google News, which collect and arranges stories based on keywords, and Digg.com, which lets users vote stories, the most popular appear sequentially in a given category. MySpace News will send crawlers to scour the Web for stories, which users will vote on. The most popular stories become the top news on MySpace.

News Corp. is searching for ways to keep its more than 100 million unique visitors, who spend an average of 10 minutes on MySpace and visit 19 times per month, according to comScore, at the site. It also needs more noncontroversial content in order to sell ads. According to Reuters, the news service will have 25 main topics and 300 sub-categories, like celebrities and autos, for example. MySpace users used to have to leave the site to read news.

This is definitely an ad play, and frankly, one that is more of a portal than a social network. However, if MySpace News is able to demonstrate that its users consume different news than what traditional media companies give us, then the move could be successful. How the company plans to deal with voting rigs, which plague Digg.com, is another issue. MySpace already has an email spam problem.

Read the whole story at Reuters »