MySpace's "News" portal goes live

MySpace, the Web’s largest social network, on Thursday entered the world of NEWS by launching a news portal that MySpace says will allow its users to read and rate hundreds of news stories displayed on the website, apparently leveraging its social-networking hub to boost the advertising revenues of the website.

The newly launched portal, known as MySpace News, is a mix between standard news-aggregation sites, such as Google News, and a news-rating site such as Digg Inc. This feature uses news aggregator technology developed by Newroo, a company last year purchased by MySpace’s parent company News Corp. owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Like Google and other news sites from portals such as Yahoo Inc. and AOL LLC, MySpace News collect stories from a number of news websites and displays them based on their category.

MySpace News brings to a much larger audience the user-recommendation capabilities already available through Digg and Time Warner Inc.'s Netscape. MySpace will go further than Google Inc.'s news offering by allowing users vote on items, helping to determine what makes the front or section pages.

With its Digg-like feature MySpace news site lets MySpace users rate stories they see on the site, and share stories with other site users. Top rated news will be displayed on the top of the items list.

The beta of news site, MySpace, one of the most popular sites on the Internet, hopes would bring in more advertising revenue by placing ads on the site's main home page as well as the home pages of its various news category sites.

Many analysts believe MySpace can earn around $500 million in revenue this year from the new site.

"Many advertisers have expressed interest in the service, which allows them to target the MySpace community in a more direct way," said Brian Norgard, co-founder of Newroo, and the creator of MySpace News.

Norgard revealed that MySpace News would display news items from more number of sources than the 4,500 used by Google News, categorizing them in 25 main sections, further fragmenting into 300 subcategories. Some of the categories like Eco-Friendly, Gadgets, Gossip and Fashion are likely designed especially to appeal to the young hip and Web-savvy user base for which the popular online teen hangout is widely-known.

MySpace News will allow publishers to block their content from being displayed on the website, according to Dan Strauss, who also worked on the project.

Although one of the world's largest media conglomerates, News Corp.'s own networks, such as Fox network, will be displayed on the news site, still they will not be given any preferential treatment and only those items rated high by the users will be displayed on the top, Strauss added.

According to Los Angeles based MySpace, the site currently has 170 million user profiles and is adding 320,000 profiles per day.

MySpace has become a common target of child protection advocates after the reports and lawsuits filed by so many victims of predators accusing it of failing to protect underage users from sexual predators.

The most widely-known lifestyle portal has been getting increasing pressure from the governments, parents and advocacy groups over the vulnerability of its users to child predators. MySpace has taken steps to ensure that its users are safe online, but many feel that the company's efforts just aren't enough.

MySpace, which also has become a common victim of spammers, is taking tougher measures to keep it from the people who launch spam attacks to retain its rapid growth.