Want to Watch MySpace in Real Time? Here’s Your Site [MediaMemo]
Despite MySpace’s well-documented woes, the site still attracts a very large audience. Want to see what they’re chatting about, as they say it? Here you go: Real time search engine Collecta has produced a site that does nothing but index MySpace users’ comments, shout-outs, videos, etc.
MySpace, along with Twitter, Facebook and everyone else who collects real-time, user-generated stuff, has opened up its stream to third-party developers, which means Collecta isn’t the only place you can see what the social network’s users have to say.
But it is, as far as I can tell, the only site offering a dedicated vertical to MySpace. (Disclosure: MySpace is owned News Corp., which owns this Web site.)
I’m still a little fuzzy about the end-game for Collecta, One Riot and all the other search startups who are mining real-time data. Each of them promises a different take on the problem: This one claims to be faster, this one says it’s more comprehensive, this one says it does a better job of sorting the data pouring out of the firehose, etc.
But it seems to me that the default winner should be Google (GOOG), which is able to index the real-time stuff and integrate it into its search results. And if Google screws that up somehow, the likely winner will be someone like Twitter or Facebook, the source for much of the data in the first place.
Then again, if we take that approach toward every new search development, then there’s really no reason for anyone to innovate again. So more power to these guys for trying.
