Now that AOL has entered the social news arena with Netscape and Yahoo has incorporated various del.icio.us and Digg influenced services into its social media and search platform, it’s time for Microsoft to also enter the picture.
MSN is testing the MSN Reporter, a Digg style social news site which was developed by a Dutch MSN team in Q4 2006.
MSN Reporter is only available in three markets; Netherlands, Belgium and Norway, while allowing users to share, vote and blog about news stories on Windows Live Spaces.
According to LiveSide, the sites have grown in popularity with some news stories earning up to 10,000 votes, or Kickens!
So far there has been considerable interest in the new service, with reportedly 500,000 and 800,000 users visting the site in the 1st and 2nd months respectively. With articles getting upto 10,000 votes and 1,000 comments, this is a on a completely different level to most existing social news sites.
This popularity does have some disadvantages though, with an increasing amount of spam now appearing on the site. What makes this such an exciting development however, is that the top 4 headlines from MSN Reporter are displayed on the MSN.nl homepage, for all to see. With popularity like this, we could be seeing the start of new era of social news on MSN.
How will Microsoft handle stories that criticize them?!?! I can’t see this working effectively with MS history of content control.
Probably in the same fashion that Digg handles stories which criticize them, by burying them :)
Everyone wants to be like Digg or try to knock Digg off their perch. I will give Microsoft’s offering a fair go when the release the English version.
Instead of trying to outdo Digg, why doesn’t Microsoft just buy Digg, and let it continue to run much in the same way Yahoo lets Delicious continue to run?
Paul, Microsoft buying Digg would potentially kill Digg. Yahoo has proven that they can acquire a company like del.icio.us, Flickr or MyBlogLog, let it run on its own, and use the technology and the brains behind such companies to better Yahoo.
I’m not sure if Microsoft has ever proven that they can do so.
And the Digg family would probably never sell out to M$ due to the negative association with the company. Google or Yahoo? Possibly another story :)
Especially since Google AdSense is Digg’s monetary bread & butter.
At the end of the day – the website that best provides the need for “socially edited news” will win ..
my guess is that the market can support no more than 1-2 mainstream news sites of this kind – along with the numerous “niche” (or “longtail”) sites that concentrate on news that is of interest to certain “niche” communities – of which there could be dozens – or even hundreds …
Digg is easily replaceable and this proves it: I have only looked at the screenshots and would switch simply from aesthetics alone.
Digg sucks….they really really do. Morons over there.
“my guess is that the market can support no more than 1-2 mainstream news sites of this kind -”
bullocks….the greater majority of internet users don’t even know about digg. plenty of room, and digg is nearly useless, looks bad, and is run like crap
digg isn’t mainstream, it’s just trendyville, were little script kiddies think they are cool
The old and good MeTooCrosoft….
me tooo… me toooo….
Microsoft is full of original ideas: ipod clone, digg clone, tiger clone, iphone clone, every product it launches is a fail… zune is on position # 620 on amazon’s electronics best seller list… all kind of crap sells more than zune, including boxes of blank CD, HDMI cables and even last century’s vinyl turntables…
MeTooCrosoft strikes again!
@DockWho, I diagree with your comment so I am digging you down…oh wait, wrong web site, nevermind . I must be a moron ;-)
Metocrosoft……not to shoot you down in your glory tirade, but the iPod and iPhone are general ideas that were only broadened from other competitors.
Safe to say that most products are created by groupB to take market segment away from groupA and tap into that money, thus creating similar models/devices.
Kicken or Dumpen are cool? That is way trendy. The term “Digg” is not great, but it is better.
Digg was great during its initial days. Now most of the Digg stories are market-driven spam, not reflecting people’s choice.
Forget Digg, Slashdot and all their clones.
The best user-submitted website-review/news/story feed site is StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/).
Heck, I even landed on this news page thanks to SU.
Digg has a large user-base and is great for finding latest news stories — thus the “digg effect” is like a major asteroid hitting a site on a single day (sometimes lasting only for a few hours till the dugg stories disappears from the main Digg pages).
StumbleUpon on the other hand is like the long tail of a comet — websites which have been “stumbled” keep getting traffic for weeks together, many times even repeat visits.
It also has a great orkut-like community where you can interact and view the blogs/pages of other Stumblers — somewhat akin to MySpace, but without all that crap.
Give it a try, you may be pleasantly surprised.
Microsoft will handle the bad PR with a short drop and a sudden stop for the posters :P
Apparently, Digg is still the most popular site available.
doc u suck balls. Digg rocks this crap sucks it will be no competition for digg at all.
Sounds like a good idea to me. Just them jumping on the bandwagon, but we can expect the same diversity in social media as in traditional media.