MSN Reporter: Digg for the Masses?

MSN Reporter, a Digg / Reddit inspired social news site with community interaction functionalities, was launched last week in The Netherlands, Norway and Belgium, after being in Beta since October 2006. This launch has been reported and discussed on several tech blogs, including TechCrunch, SearchEngineWatch, LiveSide and GigaOM. So what’s the deal?

Unlike the Yahoo Suggestion Board and Dell’s IdeaStorm, which I consider to be more feedback modules, MSN Reporter’s all about the news. People can submit news stories, and vote them up (called ‘kicking’) or down (’dumping’). It also has Windows Live integration, with Alerts, add to Live.com and with a BlogIt! option sending posts straight to Windows Live Spaces.

The new service has reportedly attracted 500 000 and 800 000 users during its first 2 months in Beta mode. Some articles are reported to have received up to 10 000 votes and 1 000 comments. There’s a downside to the success: an increasing volume of spam is reportedly now appearing on the site.

While the Dutch MSN.nl portal already displays the top 5 news stories from MSN Reporter, the Norwegian and Belgian MSN homepages only offer a link to the new site under the editorial headlines. Microsoft should remain careful, since some users have already found some loopholes.

There wasn’t a real Flemish Digg inspired site yet (in spite of the fact that it’s not really that hard to create one, just take a look at Pligg), but I wonder if there’s still room for one to launch one with a lot of extra functionalities as opposed to MSN Reporter. There’s already a French speaking counterpart, Scoopeo, which I’ll review later.