USAToday.com Goes Social, Sorta

USAToday.com has reformulated its website to incorporate a large number of more social features, as Steve Rubel reports:

[from Micro Persuasion: USAToday.com Refashions Itself as a Social Network]

This is exactly the direction USA Today needs to follow. However, it doesn't go quite far enough. In addition to building these features, the media need to bridge their communities to the ones where we already spend our time. RSS, widgets and embedded content would help here. For example, USA Today should let us add our blog, Twitter or Facebook feeds or even embedded YouTube vids to our profile pages.

I am not so sure that Steve is right on this one. First of all, it's not a social network, but a social media site. Second of all, I think that this approach -- where every major media outlet rejiggers itself into an ideosyncratic, relatively closed social application -- is ultimately annoying.

Sure, USAToday (and WSJ, NYTimes, etc.) want to be 'destinations' where people 'go' as opposed to just winding up as RSS streams. But will we actually go to these places? Especially if there are dozens or hundreds of them? How many news apps do you want to sign up to? And if you wanted to have a social experience around news media, wouldn't you want it to be open? Like the blogosphere?

Besides, I think the long range trend will be toward more flow and fewer static page-oriented applications. What I want is a social news application not limited to the content of any particular media company.

And on a more pedestrian level, I found the USAToday.com social features to be very limited. Yes, I can comment. Whoo-hoo. I can recommend (but not explain my recommendation). But I can't tag: there are so-called tags in the system, but they are really defined by the paper. I can't tag stories -- a la del.icio.us -- and I have no bookmarking either.

They do provide a profile, but I can't include anything from outside, as Steve pointed out. But there is a blog (from Pluck) allocated for every registered user, although there is no discussion about censorship, ownership, sharing revenue from ads, or any of the other questions that spring to mind. And there doesn't seem to be an RSS feed from the blog, or from any other aspect of the profile.

I would have at least expected a 'blog about this' button on every page, and then a cross-listing of all USAToday.com blog posts about stories on each page. Not very integrated. And ultimately, without the integration, why would I blog here?

tags: usatoday.com, steve+rubel, social+networking, social+media, social+applications, pluck

Comments

[Todd Zeigler]

There is an RSS feed for each user's blog. Here is a link to the on for the profile I created.

http://sitelife.usatoday.com/ver1.0/PersonaBlog/BlogRss?plckBlogId=Blog:375d41d1cd2a2ffd

[gzino]

Good points. And I'd add that their content is anti-community: wide breadth, shallow depth. Communities focus around narrow breadth, deep depth. Glad they added the features, but features don't create communities.

[number23]

I work for one of the vendors that is helping provide this solution so of course I am biased. Isn't the the point of the blogosphere to create intersections in content where people can join a conversation? Stowe, you've always asked "when are mainstream media companies going to get it?" Now here's a company who took a huge step forward and all you are talking about is what they didn't do. How many other mainstream media outlets offer their users a platform to comment positive or negative about any piece of content (including the site redesign)? More to the point there are plenty of people out there that are not of the MySpace generation who might start to Blog on usatoday.com largely because of the brand actually means something to them.

[Wilmer]

USA Today, set up a new website with all new features….a step in right way.