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Online hangout MySpace has entered the news business with a feature that lets its users determine what items other members see.
MySpace News (http://news.myspace.com/) brings to a much larger audience the user-recommendation capabilities already available through Digg and Time Warner’s Netscape. It also marks the site’s further inroads into becoming an internet portal akin to Yahoo and others.
Unlike Digg and Netscape, which rely heavily on user submissions, MySpace will also scan thousands of web journals and news sites and group results by categories such as sports and politics. MySpace will go further than Google’s news offering by letting users vote on items, helping to determine what makes the front or section pages.
As part of the service, MySpace will pull and display headlines from the outside news sites, a practice that contributed to legal challenges against Google. The search engine leader recently reached a settlement with Agence France-Presse and earlier with The Associated Press, although no lawsuit had been filed by the AP.
MySpace, like Google, would let publishers exclude their items from the site, said Dan Strauss, whose group helped develop the news service. He also said MySpace would be helping to drive traffic to the news sites, bringing MySpace readers who might not otherwise be visiting.
Source:
Australian IT
Related Links:
News @ MySpace
