On Monday, Rojo will launch an interactive news service aimed at Myspace users (and additional social networks in the future). The new product, Nooz, will leverage technologies developed by Rojo but will not be under the Rojo brand.
When I spoke to Rojo CEO Chris Alden about Nooz, he stressed that it is designed specifically for the Myspace crowd, whereas Rojo is aimed at the geek/early adopter crowd.
There are three key features. First, Myspace users can set up an account at Nooz and link directly to their Myspace profile. At Nooz, users can review blog and other RSS feed news items by category and rate them (this leverages the Rojo Mojo Digg-Like functionality). The more votes a news item gets, the higher it appears within a particular category. New stories can also be submitted using a bookmark function.
Second, users can view what news items their Myspace friends submitted or voted for.
Third, users can create a Flash widget to include on their Myspace page (or any web page - see widget below) that lists news stories they’ve voted for. Alternatively, the widget can show a pure RSS feed, although clicking on a news item brings up the post in Nooz, not on the original site).
Myspace has certainly been consulted on the Nooz product, too. I checked out the Myspace page of Ross Levinsohn, the President of Fox Interactive (parent company to Myspace) and he has a Nooz widget displayed prominently on his page. This may or may not be an endorsement of Nooz - but it certainly indicates that the Fox team knows about the product and is testing it out. And I note that Ross doesn’t have any other third party widgets on his site.
A bevy of Myspace focused third party widgets have launched recently (see Tagworld Widgets and MyPickList, for example). I don’t see these services as a sign of over-infatuation with Myspace, but simply a realization that, with nearly 80 million members, Myspace is an entire economy unto itself. Companies are going to find a way to participate in that economy as deeply as possible, with ever-more-tailored products.
This sort of reminds me of Eurekster’s swicki - http://www.swicki.com - but with a little more effort involved - the voting and digging. I don’t have time for that unless a friend of mine forces me to digg/vote a story for them. Down the road I feel this is going to raise voting and digging validity issues for “top” and “front page” news stories on sites like Digg for example. I use Eurekster’s swicki because it recs stories and searches for me in real time on my site, with no digging or voting needed from the community/user. For example, when I use e-Messenger.net, it points to the hottest stories and keywords from my buddy list and community. But I can see the value on this widget which allow a no-privacy function so you can see among your friends who recs what story… (I guess I just like privacy
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Lee, How is Nooz similar to/competitive with Eurekster Swicki? They are completely different services.
I don’t know, but this product seems rather dry to me. All it does is display what I’m reading on my MySpace page. It might work for the MySpace die-hards, but I like Rojo a whole lot more. I don’t see how it’s a geek product (Rojo), being that you’re offered your new feeds and recommendations as soon as you sign up. Geeks have their feeds ready and usually like a bare reader to fill up and customise.
It’s pretty clear that MySpace has turned into this unstoppable juggernaut, creating an industry around itself. And now that it’s become so huge, that there’s really no way it can completely collapse or get unpopular in a short period of time, because “the cool guys” think it’s lame. It’s the same with Microsoft and Windows. Mac OS X is far superior, but cannot quickly take over the market. I’m not sure if it’s a good or bad thing that we’re starting to see companies make money off the MySpace crowd. It’s phenomenon and one I don’t understand. It’s good in that more opportunities to make money are created, but bad because a collapse at the centre would destroy the entire ecosystem.
You can digg this story here.
It somewhat reminded me of swicki with the community aspect, but without auto-tagging and voting aspect - i think Wink does this voting stuff too among many other new companies. I don’t think it’s competitive at all really; apples and oranges. It’s just useless for me because I work 20 hour days (in the valley) and don’t have time like the 12 - 24 year old crowd has to vote or digg all day on their blogger friends stories (unless they are top 100 bloggers that live for this stuff).
Simran, LOL, dugg.
Hahaha… Lee, I’m a 12-24er and I don’t sit digging and blogging all day. Just for about an hour in the evening or morning. My RSS reader saves all the top stories and I glance, read and digg what interests me. It’s a fun addition to the news.
I haven’t used Swiki, but I did notice that it isn’t displaying properly here on TechCrunch (the box). Just incase it’s fine on other peoples’ machines, I’m using Safari on OS X.
Hehehe… thanks.
Yeah, I’m having Safari issues with the Swicki thing. Working on it.
this is really putting the pressure on me to get my Google AdSense MySpace AdWidget out the door!! Time is of the essence here! ;)) Should i be First to Market or 2nd??
Didn’t this launch a while back? I was testing it in May:
http://mashable.com/2006/05/12/nooz-digg-myspace/
Hey.. anyone know how Nooz and singlestat.us are grabbing data out of myspace since there is no API? Is it all scrapes from the website? Or do they have a partnership in place?
bagus: i’m pretty sure they’re just hitting/parsing the page.
If MySpace does not “web 2.0″ themselves (yeah, they have blogs with RSS), I guess others will do it for them.