Reuters reported on Monday afternoon that social-networking site MySpace.com plans to launch a "news feed" feature in the near future.
The statement was made by Peter Levinsohn, president of MySpace parent company (and News Corp. division) Fox Interactive Media, at the Reuters Media Summit on Monday. "The concept of a news feed is something we are very focused on, and we'll be well down the path in the next 30 to 45 days," Levinsohn said at the summit.
The news feed, which provides a user with updates from the people on his or her friends list, was pioneered by MySpace rival Facebook. Originally seen as invasive and "stalker-ish," the news feed is now considered by many to be one of Facebook's chief innovations.
Additionally, Reuters reported, Levinsohn said that MySpace will start allowing its members to operate different versions of a profile for groups like family, friends, and co-workers. This is something that Facebook does not offer--though the company has hinted that it may be on the way--but more recent entrants like Plaxo Pulse do.
MySpace, to put it bluntly, is playing catch-up. It still leads the U.S. social-networking market in overall membership and traffic, but has come under fire for everything from design to usability to underlying architecture. In recent weeks, the company has opted to join Google's OpenSocial platform, potentially boosting its tech cred--and announced a targeted advertising program days before Facebook launched its "Social Ads."
Reuters and the Nokia Research Center have announced that they are working on a joint project to enable journalists to file and publish stories and multimedia news content from handheld devices instead of computers. Called Reuters Mobile Journalism, the initiative relies upon connecting peripherals to Nokia's high-end N95 device--a Bluetooth-enabled keyboard, a small tripod for video interviews, and a microphone that can plug into the mobile handset--as well as software to make it easier to put together text, images and streaming media.
The Nokia N95
(Credit: Nokia)"By running on handheld devices, rather than on bulkier laptop computers, the mobile journalism application enables us to create complete stories and file them for distribution, without leaving the scene," Nic Fulton, chief scientist of Reuters Media, said in a statement from the two companies. "This saves us time and benefits our audience by ensuring that they receive high quality news that is absolutely up-to-date."
It would also, of course, require that the reporter in question be equipped with an N95 handset.
Over the summer, Reuters ran trials of mobile journalism in situations as varied as the U.S. presidential primary campaign events, the Edinburgh TV festival and New York Fashion Week, where stories were filed from the field. Currently, the plan is to make the finished product available to professional journalists, but a number of university students will be used for a trial run to see how the "toolkit" fits into the ever-growing citizen journalism niche.
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