If you do not like it, build it
That is the fun part about the whole cost of a startup right now, the whole process can be a commodity process, and News Corp via MySpace are about to prove the theory right. With them working on a Facebook style system for feeds, and build your own advertising network, News Corp stands to unify the advertising across all their properties, under cut Google, and take more of the game than they have been doing before.
There is just something that is so clean and simple with building your own system to suit your own needs, rather than dealing with what others have built that suit their own needs, and not necessarily your needs.
We got so annoyed with Digg, Reddit and everything else, that we built our own social book mark site at Yasvs.com and use it to track the things we are interested in without having to deal with the bans, benches, comments, and other stuff that really turned us off on the system.
We can fully understand why News Corp would want to build out their own feed system, and advertising system for all their properties. The interesting thing is that the properties like MySpace and others (if they purchase linkedin) they have a basis to start extending that into other properties.
This could do Google some good competition, which they really do not have right now. Google owns feed burner, and provides ads for MySpace, while Microsoft provides ads for Linkedin, in all having major sites under News Corp could prove to be very interesting in terms of providing a viable alternative, with its own captive audience of web sites that would cross over.
Yahoo is not a real competitor in this space yet, News Corp could align a lot of older media behind it in ways that Microsoft, Google and others can not. That is what makes this deal so interesting, and what typifies the entire web 2.0 ethic, if you hate what you have it is a commodity option to build what you need.
The only real question is making it profitable, making it available, and whom else News Corp can bring into the grand vision.
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