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Microsoft Plans News Aggregator
wyldeone writes "ZDNet says Microsoft is planning on creating a news aggregation service similar to Google's Google News. It will draw headlines from over 4,800 sites. It will also provide customized feeds, similar to Googles News alerts. Here is the beta version of the site."
One OS
One People
One Nexus
I can't wait to see how they 're-write' links and searches
to 'enhance' your experience.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Who needs 4800 news sources?
I have BBC, NYTimes, a few industry-specific, a few 'for interest' (e.g. Economist, New Scientist, Reason.com), a few for sport and one for UK TV Listings. Maybe a dozen tops and I am one of the most well-informed people I know.
Too much information = too easy to lose the salient stuff.
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Well, from the FAQ, it looks like MSN is using generalized clickthru and your personal history to customize the results. I don't think Google does either of those.
Without breaking copyright law? Are they really going to license content from every single site? Or will the Feds bust them like Adam McGaughey?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
You do realize that they can set a Firefox favourite or homepage just as easily as they can set an IE homepage, right?
Is it just me or does this thing not even work on Macs? I'm using IE something or the other on OSX and I get nada - newsbot.msn.com no work. Tried it on PC and it looks like MSNBC to me. What a waste of electricity.
Don't worry: your brain will eventually work inspite of you.
Well, at least one thing that MSN Newsbot dows that Google News doesn't, is that MSN attempts to personalize the news page based on passed clicks. Now, my newsbot has been doing that for almost 3 years now (plus a lot more, like customized XML and PDA feeds, peer networks, etc) with a more varied selection of sources (end of shameless plug :-)
It's slower than google news. Because it uses the left hand side MSNBC toolbar (with its less than instantaneous menus) less actual news fits on my screen.
Finally, this statement is somewhat disturbing.
"Newsbot (beta) responds to your reading preferences. Clicking on articles determines what we base your recommendations on."
MSNBC does go out of its way to label AP wire service stories as such, which is a nice touch-- I really don't need to read the same story 700 times.
However, google does print the headlines of stories from three sources for each news item, which is more useful that a simple "Also covered in Sun, Herald-Tribune, and ABC". Speaking of which, is that the Chicago Sun, International Herald Tribune, and American Broadcasting Company? Or is it The Sun, Southwest Florida Herald Tribune, and Australian Broadcasting Company?
Usenet being what it is, the censorship is pretty ineffective (generally, most news servers won't honour third-party cancel requests in unmoderated newsgroups) but it is quite petty. Especially since kurttrail is a damn good debater and tends to come out on top in any real debate the MS-defenders get into with him, which only makes MS's positions look worse.
Jeez! Does Microsoft come up with anything new anymore? Their entire business plan seems to be to find something someone else is making money on and to copy it.
I have a feeling that this is the behavior pattern of a dinosaur as it goes off to die. In this industry it really is innovate or die, which gets harder and hardeer as a corporation gets large and lethargic. Again, I think Microsft rewally is their own worst enemy.
For everyone complaining...
1. It's beta, it's gonna be ugly.. big deal.
2. It wasn't Google's innovation either.
3. Competition is good. Isn't that what you champion on this site anyways?
what use could that have other than to direct people how to align themselves with the mainstream and think more alike?
</hat>
I think the point was that Microsoft's news site would be set as the default...amazing as it may seem to the readers of slashdot (and I don't mean to be sarcastic), most people who use computers actually don't change the defaults (as we do so often). I'm not sure why, but I'm constantly amazed at how pervasive the "default" is.
Case and point: IE comes with windows, it's icon is put on the desktop. It has, what, 90% market share? It was considered big inroads for Firefox the other week when Firefox gained 1%. I bet MS could ship Firefox with windows and bury it in a menu somewhere and people would STILL use IE, so long as it was the icon that appeared on the desktop.
I've been building my own news aggregate too
same sort of idea, let the user see what they want, do some searching and browsing by category
i really want to do something like slashdot does and let you pick the channels that show up by default, but I just haven't gotten there yet
anyways, it's at http://fooey.net/NewsArchives/
only problem is the stupid thing is too addicting, and I end up spending WAY too much time reading the hundreds upon hundreds of articles scrolling through it every day