MySpace, the social networking site owned by News Corp, has launched MySpace News, a Digg like site that will allow the 160 million users to rank the news stories on order of importance, relevance and freshness.
The service is built on Newroo Technology, a startup that News Corp acquired last year, even before the beta release. MySpace News is fetching news items from a number of trusted sources via RSS feeds and have organized them into 25 main categories and 300 sub categories including fashion, entertainment, sports, technology and others. Users can vote on each item from 1-5 and at the moment there is no option to negatively vote an item. Just like Digg, the positioning of the news item is determined by user voting, the more votes it gets the higher it will appear on its respective category. At the moment users can not submit news but I think its just a matter of time before that is allowed as well.
This will certainly be a serious threat to Digg and Netscape. Digg which recently hit 1 million registered user mark, will now have to compete against a service that is 160 times as big as it is. Some might argue against it and in favor of digg, but no one can deny the fact that user generated content requires users to prosper and MySpace news has enough of users to become a really interesting news site.
