MySpace and Citysearch are jointly announcing a new MySpace property this morning called MySpace Local. The site combines Citysearch business listings (including address, photos, menus, videos, maps and hours of location) from a thousand cities with the MySpace community. The site is launching into private beta this week, with a general U.S. launch next month.
The new site will eventually include listing information for all Citysearch businesses via small business listing pages. To start just restaurants, bars and “nightlife” listings are included. Users can rate and review businesses, which is shared via the MySpace activity feed.
Don’t just skip over that last sentence. This is good stuff – users will be able to see the restaurants, bars and other businesses that their friends are interested in, and how they rated those businesses. When you first visit MySpace Local, the first thing you see are reviews from friends.
Listings are grouped into city hubs for all major U.S. cities and include new local search functionality. And eventually, MySpace says, users will be able to make reservations and upload their own photos and videos. Features will also be built into MySpace mobile products.
A demo of the product is here.
It’s All About The Money
Don’t be fooled – the reason for all this local content is to create premium ad space. Businesses will be able to use MySpace’s self service MyAds product to promote these pages. And more importantly, they can place an ad when someone is looking at the competitors or other local businesses. Expect national brands to advertise as well – Coors and Outback Steakhouse are initial sponsors of the site.
Citysearch has already integrated Facebook Connect, allowing Facebook users to pull reviews and other information they leave at Citysearch into their Facebook news feed. MySpace is saying we can expect an implementation of MySpaceID, their version of Facebook Connect, in the near future. But MySpace Local goes a full step further, bringing all this listing data directly into MySpace itself, and creating literally tons of ad inventory for the sales team (and self service product) to sell into.
The terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, other than that this is a revenue sharing agreement.
This sounds like a great move by myspace, creating localized content.
Well from an aesthetic standpoint, I am repelled by the thought of more myspace pages on the web.
That said, for a business standpoint, I must admit that it is brilliant.
Agree with @Ashu.
I can’t stand either of these sites but I think its a great move for both of them.
Is MySpace the best place to promote a respectable business? I wouldn’t want my business anywhere near a kid oriented social networking site.
Jeff, it’s not a kid-oriented site. Check Comscore – over 75% of the users are over 18. MySpace’s demo has always pretty closely to the entire US population – there’s people of all types there. (It’s just that the kids profiles are so loud!)
I wonder why they went with citysearch instead of yelp. I guess the deal is more attractive to citysearch and form MySpace’s POV they’re a more mature organization..
Glad to see improvement, but it’s a shame there’s so much dilution within a recommendation system. And we all know there probably won’t be any data/recommendation portability.
Their history and content tells us that Citysearch appears to have much lower standards of quality than even Yelp. They used to be pretty good, too, until they went all AllMusic and ruined the user experience somewhere along the way.
Rob Angel would crush Jeremy Stoppelman in a cage match!
yelp is great, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the listing volume that citysearch has.
in fact…MS getting into this business directly is a serious competitive threat to yelp.
What do you mean by that? Do you think Citysearch has more businesses or more reviews than Yelp, and if so why?
The reviews already on Citysearch shouldn’t matter. What myspace gets is a database of properties that can be fed into a myspace feature. a HUGE database…
Doesn’t hurt that their corporate offices are both in LA…
what about the citysearch facebook connect implementations they were raving about a few weeks ago…?
Hyper-local content & ads are gaining traction both in user demand/consumption, ad buys and startups coming to market with great hyperlocal-based services. Good move by MySpace.
Great move by Myspace, but they need more to fight agaist Facebook.
Myspace has become a slum community. It’s going to require a lot of change to upgrade it’s image to a respectful community. It may be easier marketing for them to start again like with a mytown.com – rather than reposition myspace.
@DJ thanks for pointing out no brainer. will a business ever say to a customer to check out there recommendations at ms? just the mention of ms in a business setting can offend some people. if mslocal was started in the beginning it may of had a better chance of survival. myspac is scarred and for any serious contention will have to think outside theirspace.
LocalDepot.com – we can help
MySpace seems like it’s really stepping things up, every couple of days a new product or service offering. After so many years of just letting the site sit, it’s good to see them finally pushing new stuff out.
It seems like FB could learn something from MySpace in this regard (considering they actually make money at it). All of FB’s feature tweaks and new profile pages only involve either in-house developed offerings or crap made on their app playform, while MySpace seems to be partnering with anyone and everyone to bring new services to their users. Seems like MySpace’s offerings are actually lot more rich now than FB’s nowardays because they recognize their core competence isn’t everything under the sun and partner with 3rd parties who know specialize in the new offering.
I Wonder if Zuck will realize FB may need 3rd party offerings and that FB can’t rely solely on their own in-house development (I don’t think 3rd party apps on the platform count either–consider MS music compared to any FB music app, or any other comparable offerings). If he doesn’t we may see MS begin to widen the gap even further in terms of revenues as they become better and better and monetizing their traffic and keeping user’s onsite, even if FB outpaces them in shear user numbers.
Just my .02
Dan–Diasgree. MySpace was a platform designed to be “open”. This should make it *much* easier for small businesses to aggregate “fans/friends” in my opinion. While Facebook may be classier, what is needed in the small business space is an extremely cost effective and efficient yellow pages–not the classiest goal to begin with. No?
@Alan
Since when has myspace been designed to be open. Probably at the time they released MDP, after facebook had an api released for maybe over a year. check your facts. The stack they implement may be open, but obviously from the popularity of facebook connect, it doesn’t matter.
@Alan
myspace may be able to pull it off if they can clean up their image and reputation in the local business community. Most people that I talk too feel that myspace is a social network for the 13-25 crowd.
You Need to check out LocalADLink….way better system than myspace, citysearch
How appropriate. A past-its-time social network pairs with a past-its-time local search.
Anybody know how they’re planning on monetizing this aside from the sponsored links at the top of the results?
Curious to see if they’re going to allow these businesses to pay for optimized search placement, or something else equally questionable to bring in more cash.
Either way, have to agree that this may be a good move for Myspace, but is more than likely too little too late – same for Citysearch. There are much better products out there that do both of these things, and I’m sure more are being developed as we speak.
Myspace should change their name, cut/paste their code, and start a new site…then they might have a chance of surviving. Aside from music, they are dead in the eyes of 90% of my friends (including myself).
“Myspace should change their name, cut/paste their code, and start a new site…then they might have a chance of surviving.”
- This is actually the No. 1 rule of thumb for branding: spin off a new brand name rather than confusing the brand by appending to the main brand like Myspace Music, Myspace Video, Myspace blah blah.
Not sure why so many smart people at myspace doesn’t know anything about branding…
It kills the brand.
Just one man’s opinion, but I think the portal stance myspace is taking is short sited and meant only to get revenue back up immediately. The future is in single sign on, and as facebook makes it easier (and more meaningful) for publishers to integrate with their solution, more will do so. Myspace is creating a gated community (even though they are half assing a single sign-on solution), and will run into some of the same issues as yahoo, aol, etc… Facebook is putting a leash on us, but allowing us to have a sense of freedom… To go out and run around the neighborhood “unsupervised”. They are creating tools for developers and letting them create. This will spurn real innovation and amazing experiences (all of which Facebook will profit from). Myspace is telling developers to create tools for them. At some point, no matter how many cool toys you have at home, you want to go out and see what else is out there…
I think you are confused. Facebook is the walled garden. MySpace was designed with open in mind. They have MySpaceID, which I believe was introduced a day or two before Facebook Connect, and they have incorporated the OpenSocial initiative and data portability. Facebook is the one hoarding its user data.
Very interesting development for myspace and social platforms.
Some of the most interesting notifications you get on Facebook are related to events and photos. Both have a strong ‘real life’ aspect. Photos are basically a record of an event or gathering that happened in the past. And events are notices of something going in the future where you can go and meet real people.
Myspace local also has this real life aspect to it. It could be used to tell friends where you’ve been and where you’re going. And that will influence where your friends will go next time and so on.
I don’t see why Facebook could not do something similar with Yelp.
Myspace sux. Citysearch sux. Putting them together? Awesomely good/bad idea. Doesn’t matter what Myspace does at this point, anyway- traffic is gone. Users have defected. No one out there thinks it’s relevant any longer. My 16 year old would not be caught dead in there, and none of his friends would, either.
@Stan – Define relevancy please, beyond the opinion of your 16 year old son and his friends. Does industry media coverage make a site more relevant, or does engagement? myspace and fb are two completely different sites with different user behaviors and value propositions. i’m on both, and while i feel neither are exactly what I’m looking for, they each fulfill a different need for me (e.g. caught up with my old hs buddy on fb, watched and shared exclusive movie trailer with friends on myspace)
I know it’s just a demo, but would it have been too hard to have a review of Pink’s Hot Dogs that didn’t describe it as a sushi restaurant?
“Pink’s Hog Dogs – Our chefs prepare innovative small dishes out of succulent, sliced hunks of raw fish…..”
Hail the foot-long dog-fish sushi with sauerkraut and pickles!
Funny, Julian
Myspace is making bad decisions left and right. Instead of purchasing CitySearch and letting them do their thing and “helping” them grow. Thereby increasing their bottom line, maybe feeding them traffic, but not rebranding it. Tom wants Myspace to be the only stop on the internet, and thats NEVER going to happen..
well time will tell if Myspace pulls a yelp and starts charging businesses extortion fees to manipulate user reviews …
Once myspace and facebook enter the yellow page listing arena, yelp’s influence will diminish greatly and so will their ability to charge the 300 bucks a month they now extort from businesses for “sponsored listings”
It’s a bid deal and will certainly (re)ignite the Local space. Hell, the travel startups are all trying to be local and travel now, so the space is unbelievably crowded. Myspace Local is going to reap havok on search engine results for the next few months, that’s for sure, but at the end of the day, MS is stuck with Citysearch, both fading brands and certainly considered in the lower area of the dustbin. Now if this were Facebook + Yelp, there would be some Earths shattering.
Hopefully the dinosaur yellow page and directory publishes will get into the game soon.
I look forward to Facebook’s response and most certainly which major player is finally going to pull the trigger on Yelp.
“It’s All About The Money – Don’t be fooled – the reason for all this local content is to create premium ad space.”
“Don’t be fooled”? What’s that supposed to mean? Way to put a negative spin on it there, per usual. Isn’t that called a business model?
None of the current social networks are shining beacons of altruism – they are all out to make money.
Most people that I talk too feel that myspace is a social network for the 13-25 crowd.
I don’t see why Facebook could not do something similar with Yelp.