Last week we saw first Yahoo! and then Dell launch sites that were largely acknowledged to be Digg inspired. Digg may not have invented the vote-on-news motif but it may have been most important in popularizing the paradigm so far. Now LiveSide, a great place to follow all things Live.com, reports on three European Microsoft sites currently in Beta that better embody the ethic of Digg than any of the other big players have yet.
Called MSN Reporter, the service is being tested in the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. Users can submit links from any domain on the web. Other users can then vote stories up or down and leave comments. The sites are seeing a fair amount of traffic, approaching a total of 1 million visitors per month after two months in beta.
Two things are most striking about MSN Reporter. First, these social news experiments are already being leveraged in the heart of MSN’s larger online properties - nl.msn.com for example displays the top four MSN Reporter stories right on the front page. AOL certainly doesn’t put the top Netscape stories on its front page - there’s a fairly arduous editorial process required just to get stories from the sprawling Weblogs Inc. network onto AOL proper. For MSN to put top social news stories on the front page of a primary site is a big deal.
The second big step taken by MSN Reporter is that unlike supposed Digg clones at Yahoo!, Dell and AOL’s Netscape - MSN Reporter users are able to submit links to pages completely outside of MSN control and no effort is made to keep readers tied to the MSN domain when they visit those sites. Reporter is an important sign that for at least one big player, walled content gardens aren’t as set in stone as we might think. Digg was a key market leader in demonstrating that a site can win in terms of traffic by letting its users point each other off site. Monetization is a big question that remains for these sites, but MSN appears willing in Europe at least to experiment meaningfully with the approach.
There are certainly differences between MSN Reporter and Digg, the most notable being the ability to vote stories down as well as up and the absence of substantial user profiles. Digg has arguably gained a lot of steam from the top users whom until recently won bragging rights from an onsite list of their names and contributions.
Despite those differences, Digg’s launch in 2004 marked the beginning of a shift towards accessibility and popularity in social news that SlashDot in 1997, Del.icio.us in 2003 and Reddit in 2005 did not. If MSN Reporter spreads beyond these 3 beta sites and continues to be placed on the front page of MSN sites - I think MSN may go down in history as the first major player to leverage deep integration of the social news paradigm.
You are right that MSN may go down in history but my take on this is that MSN and Digg will help many others understand how one can monetize (if any) from these social news sites. However it is interesting to see MSN in this game as well.
as expected every “web” company will have digg thingy. It is easy to implement.However “digg” will be an easy winner, similar to the way “youtube” is a winner in spite of 101 video sharing sites over there.
If every MSN site was laid out so well as MSN Reporter is, I would feel in heaven.
Time for MS to get those European designers to America. Get hotmail, re-re-designed, maybe?
-Zaid
Digg-inspired, or Digg-like sites are springing up all over the place
As far as know, when Microsoft wants to imitate something, it always can’t get it right at the first time!
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http://www.MillionReturn.Com — Return $1m from 1 page! How?
“leverage deep integration of the social news paradigm”
I enjoy your posts Marshall, but this looks like a phase generated from that JavaScript bullshit generator.
Digg should have sold out when they had the chance. They’re most likely still unable to monetize effectively (haven’t seen any dramatic, visible shifts on their site that would indicate a new monetization strategy) and their lack of any defensible technology puts them in a horrible position. Far too often the innovators lose out. In Web 2.0, just look at Friendster. MySpace wisely sold out, while services like Facebook and Digg just might push their luck beyond the point where they can maximize return, if they can sell out at all. I think the inability to sell out at a valuation acceptable to the VCs is a greater threat for Digg than it is for Facebook, although at some point the willingness for anybody to pay upwards of $500 million for Facebook (the reported valuation at their previous round) is likely to diminish too.
It’s better to brand this sites as mediarati than the repoter extention it’s been called.
“Interesting stuff,” says Trott Felipe.
Come on, this shit is broken as hell :), check out my blog on how to spam the shit out of it
web2.0 is no idea1.0 !!
I wish them luck, the most successful Digg clone until now in the Netherlands is http://www.ekudos.nl (on Rails)
Here’s a chart that compares the features of Yahoo, Dell, and MSN:
http://www.computers.net/2007/.....iggli.html
I am so sick of all of these big companies selling out and mirroring other sites.
WOW, did you see the number on those interanational sites. Good for MSN for expanding on a niche that Digg has been VERY SLOW to set up.
For the life of me, I can not understand how a site like Digg continues to think of advertising as the way to make money. WHile I realize Digg will always have it’s own users, not monetizing any better is going to be an issue now that new, more powerful competition is coming to the market.