CES: MySpace wants to friend your television, but do you?

January 7, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

Today, at the CES consumer electronics conference in Las Vegas, Toshiba introduced its plans for offering “connected” television — and social network MySpace is going along for this ride. In partnership with a variety of web sites, including Yahoo, the electronics manufacturer is introducing “TV widgets,” or small windows that can show you information like local weather and your stocks’ daily performance.

MySpace, for its part, is introducing a made-for-TV widget that lets you use MySpace while watching TV. For example, you might use MySpace’s status update feature to tell friends about a show you’re watching. The News Corp.-owned social network will let its users do this through MySpaceID, the company’s initiative for helping other sites and services make use of MySpace user data.

It’s all a neat idea. One can imagine a MySpace user sending a message to all his friends saying, “guys check out this basketball game on channel 5, the Blazers are about to win.”

MySpace plans to roll this widget out to any connected TV, not just those made by Toshiba. Other television makers are busy working on the same idea; here’s our look at Samsung’s effort. But current tools for turning your TV into a computer haven’t proven especially popular. Will users even bother using MySpace on their TV to talk about a basketball game when they can do so by, say, having their laptop open as they’re watching. After all, I’m already doing the latter right now.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • incredibly smart, and a great way (apropos the earlier, solid, VB article on the "demise of the Times") for Newscorp (and other media co's) to really get a lot of pop out of their properties. One can imagine everything from FoxSports fantasy groups watching games with a chat and league widget to myspace and viacom doing a deal for Mtv, to the Times, Journal, etc on their products and venues (like CNBC, etc.).
  • I tend to agree with Eric on this one. Why would I want MySpace on my TV when it's a lot easier to just pull it up on my laptop while i'm watching TV. Also, CBS has learned with their interactive viewing rooms that TV tends to be an asynchronous event meaning that not too many people want to interact while they're watching the show. Instead they want to talk about it when it's over. Sports could be a little different as evidence by some of the ESPN forums during games, but not sure if MySpace can really make headway there.