OPEN

The Sun is bringing social media to its readers with the launch of  MySun, a social networking service based on the massively popular myspace platform, which News Corp bought last year for half a billion dollars.

While the Guardian is leading the charge into social media in the UK, if not the world, with its many different experiments with blogging and podcasts, and the Telegraph is producing a very high quality daily podcast, UK tabloids have yet to make much headway in this sector. Now the Sun is effectively leap-frogging the up-market titles with a service to build community with its readers.

It will be the second time Sun readers have been offered new media under this brand. The paper dropped its free email service three years ago in a housekeeping exercise to rid itself of dot-com boom ephemera.

It’s going to be very interesting to see how the paper markets the service and how it goes down with its readers. Younger Sun readers will already be very aware of the myspace service as its referred to constantly by Radio One DJs.

(Via Media Guardian and Stephen Davies. Disclosure: I have colleagues who work with News Corp companies,
although I do not personally – this piece is my own point of view and the news came via the sources noted.)

technorati tags: The_Sun, News_Corp, Social_media, myspace