Myspace’s Digg Clone is … Meh

Myspace launched a social news site last week that allows users to vote on stories and democratically determine popularity, much like Digg.  I’ve spent some time getting a feel for how it works and my opinion is that the site, much like everything Myspace produces, is medicore at best.  The interface is clunky and has a simple voting system that isn’t particularly enticing; you vote on a 1 – 5 scale and it shows the number of votes and the average score.  It does require you to actually view the submission in a frame before you can vote, however, so unlike Digg you can’t blindly vote for something without actually reading it first.  I submitted a few stories but from what I can tell they are moderated before being made live because I couldn’t find them later.  Oddly enough, the most popular story on myspace news right now is MySpace News is no Digg-killer, which doesn’t seems like something they’d want to promote on the first week of launch.

The good news is that if you do get past the moderation process it currently only takes 2 votes to get something promoted to the homepage.  That’s your cue, SEOs.

So does Myspace have a shot at being the next big social news site?  Absolutely.  Myspace has the advantage of having a captive audience of millions of users whose attention they could easily divert to the myspace news site.  If they simply added news headlines to the top of everyone’s homepage, the sheer volume of people reading myspace news would more than make up for the fact that it’s a mediocre product.  Just because it’s utter crap probably won’t make a difference, Myspace itself is a good testament to that.  If it does take off, I’m curious to see what getting on the myspace homepage will be like in the next year or two.  Getting on the Digg homepage results in some pretty astounding traffic numbers, but imagine if you made the homepage of a social news site that wasn’t just confined to the tech/geek crowd.