The digerati's first impressions of MySpace's social news venture, which launched in beta yesterday, was anything but positive. Well undercooked was the general consensus, even for a beta launch.
No one was more harsh, or more scatological, than Rex Dixon who called MySpace News nothing more than a clipping service linking the kind of of generic user rating system that is a generic part of many content management systems
At Wired News, Michael Calore concisely identifies problems more specifically :
MySpace users can't add stories, only vote on them....
The site has no search, you have to browse items by category. Story ranking is counter-intuitive - are we looking at stories ranked by number of votes or average vote? The top story on the site has only 16 votes. Also, when you click through to a story, a MySpace News navigation bar remains at the top of the page (see my second screenshot below). A second click is required to load the linked article. This strikes me as a usability no-no, but maybe it's just a matter of preference.
But Josh Lowenstein at Webware most specifically hit the nail on the head:
There are quite a few things missing from MySpace News. The first is integration with MySpace proper. There's currently no way to show which stories you've been rating (or reading) on your MySpace profile. Likewise, you can't see what your friends have been up to, something that is critical for a social network.
I'm not ready to pile on MySpace after one day, but it does seem to me that if social news is going to work it will have to rely on the kind of word of mouth discovery that comes from see what your friends are reading. I'm surprised that wasn't the first step for the development team.
Twittermania, Chapter 387: The start-up story of the year so far in social media is the astounding rise of Twitter. Evan Williams' Obvious announced on Monday that the company would spin off Twitter, with co-founder Jack Dorsey serving as CEO
Meanwhile developers and entrepreneurs continue to experiment with Twitter as platform. This morning at Mashable Kristen Nicole describes how Menuism, a restaurant ratings business, is using a Twitter feed its developed called Gutcheck through which members can share what their eating. And Fred Wilson offers a very interesting thought piece about his vision of Twitter's future as "the status broadcasting system of the Internet":
I don't consume local services very often on my phone because it's a hassle to log in and tell them where I am. But if I could just send a text message to Twitter with my location and information starts coming to me on my phone, I'll do that.
If all these things happen because of one text message I sent to Twitter, that's fantastic....
Twitter is a simple but flexible status broadcasting system. The web doesn't have one yet and so Twitter is going to be it.
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