Mele’s Musings

MySpace: My Portal?

If MySpace becomes a portal, will they be the new category killer?

Picture: businessweek.com

Article excerpt:  News Corp. wants its popular social networking site to be a gateway to the Internet—and go head-to-head with Yahoo and Google lnJust as Yahoo! (YHOO) gets one competitor off its back by quitting merger discussions with Microsoft (MSFT), the Web portal may soon find itself going head-to-head with a new rival. Starting June 18, News Corp.’s (NWS) social network MySpace is introducing design changes it hopes will make it look and feel a lot more like Yahoo.  If all goes to plan, MySpace would go beyond being a site where people build personalized profile pages and hang out online with friends, and become more of a gateway to the Web, where users can read news headlines, listen to music, watch videos, and more easily communicate with pals. “What we want to do is make MySpace the start page of the Internet,” says MySpace co-founder and President Tom Anderson. “When we talk about competition…I think about Yahoo and Google.”
The rest: businessweek.com

Musing:  I think Yahoo and Google have much to fear if MySpace and/or Facebook can establish themselves as portals.  The combination of personal information and content/information aggregation is really powerful.  It certainly changes the landscape.  The killer app in this whole mess, ironically, may be email.  Because gmail and Yahoomail are already so established, getting people to switch to an email client from MySpace may be challenging, but MySpace may be able to work around that with clever programming.  MySpace’s current approach – an email/message board hybrid seems to me to be a stop-gap at best.