By: Chris | Source: liveside.net

Now that AOL has entered the social news arena with Netscape and Yahoo has incorporated various del.icio.us and Digg influenced services into its social media and search platform, it’s time for Microsoft to also enter the picture.

As an ongoing part of MSN’s efforts to increase the amount of user generated content on its network, the Dutch MSN team has created MSN Reporter, a social news site similar to the likes of digg and reddit. Available in beta since October 2006

MSN Reporter is only available in three markets; Netherlands, Belgium and Norway, while allowing users to share, vote and blog about news stories on Windows Live Spaces.

Allowing users to share and rate news on the site, it has a simple interface, much like the Digg of old. It also has Windows Live integration, with Alerts, add to Live.com and with a BlogIt! option sending posts straight to Windows Live Spaces. With buttons that says "Kicken!" and "Dumpen!" who doesn’t feel the urge to participate?

So far there has been considerable interest in the new service, with reportedly 500,000 and 800,000 users visting the site in the 1st and 2nd months respectively.  With articles getting upto 10,000 votes and 1,000 comments, this is a on a completely different level to most existing social news sites. This popularity does have some disadvantages though, with an increasing amount of spam now appearing on the site. What makes this such an exciting development however, is that the top 4 headlines from MSN Reporter are displayed on the MSN.nl homepage, for all to see. With popularity like this, we could be seeing the start of new era of social news on MSN.

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