Tech Shout!

On Thursday, popular social networking Web site MySpace launched an extension of their service called ‘MySpace News’. This news Web site, which is yet in its beta phase aggregates RSS feeds and news links from blogs and traditional news Web sites across the Internet. Besides, ‘MySpace News’ allows users to vote, submit and rate news articles based on what they think is most interesting.

As part of the new service, MySpace News will also pull and display headlines from outside news sites. Bloggers can also submit their own sites for inclusion as sources. Items on MySpace News will then be organized into 25 main categories and 300 sub-categories including sports, politics, style and technology. Topics will be listed by category, alphabetical order and popularity.

MySpace News appears to be very similar in approach to that of Digg, another popular social networking Web site. Digg solely relies on user news link submission, whereas MySpace News asserts itself with a higher level of control over news links displayed on its Web site, which is determined based on a number of factors such as news source topic quality, content freshness, popularity and the number of links from other Web sites.

Besides its newly launched news service, MySpace, which is powered by Google continues to have existing features such as Web profiles, blogs, instant messaging, email, music streaming, music video, photo galleries, classified listings, events, groups, college communities and member forums. Currently, there are over 165 million members registered with the Web site.