Dec 5, 2008 04:20 PM
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Wed Feb 10
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The celebrity-industrial complex will expand, must expand, can't help but expand until every site on the Web features gossipy famous-people headlines. The latest entrant: DailyFill, MySpace's slapdash copycat celebrity-news site.
The oddest thing about DailyFill's launch is its parent company: MySpace is part of the News Corp. empire, and it even carries items from Page Six, the stalwart gossip section of the New York Post. Page Six tried to launch its own gossip site, which got the slash in March after a three-month run. (Technically, the site came from Slingshot Labs, a MySpace-run incubator; Slingshot is ostensibly independent, but for all practical purposes, it exists to generate new sites and features for MySpace. You can tell how non-independent Slingshot actually is by how extremely touchy Slingshot employees get when you suggest it's part of MySpace.)
MySpace tends to run independently, even from Fox Interactive, the News Corp. division in which it's housed. And the social network's executives have absolutely zero shame about launching thoroughly derivative also-ran features. (You've probably never seen a MySpace Video embed, but you're not missing anything — it looks just like YouTube.)
DailyFill's in the same vein: It looks just like Yahoo's pictures-and-headlines OMG, which is, in turn, more or less a less texty clone of AOL's TMZ.
"We shat this out in a week," a MySpace engineer tells me.
The main difference from MySpace's other cloning experiments is that the MySpace brand is nowhere to be seen on the site. Could it be that MySpace, like AOL, is growing ashamed of the tawdry associations of its own brand? The site does have a small homage to its boss, however, in an item about MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe getting named to People's sexiest-dudes list.
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