Jon Holato

MySpace News, their latest service based on the acquisition of NewRoo, is set to launch today. The service will begin as a news aggregator, similar to Google News how information is pulled in from multiple sources across the Web, and will evolve into the Digg-like arena of social, user-submitted news. The URL, said to be news.myspace.com, was still unavailable to the public as of the time of this writing.

This a rather interesting product for MySpace to launch. While boldly going after market share from Google News or Digg is a dangerous and probably stupid move, there is some room within those verticals where MySpace News can acquire a bit of a following as long as it stays within its niche. This means music and television news, celebrity gossip, etc.

There is no way, and maybe I’m a little biased here as a Digger :), but there is simply no way MySpace can compete with Digg across the board on all topics. A big reason why Digg has been so successful is the nature of its user base: stereotypically young, educated, computer geeks. Digg users are the type of individuals who pushed the Internet to where it is today, and to where it will be going tomorrow. I just can’t see Sally Smith, mother of 3 from Anytown, USA submitting Ubuntu tips and tricks to her small group of family contacts on MySpace.

At any rate, it’s an experiment and it will be interesting to see how it is received by MySpace users.