MSN Launches msnNOW Social Trends App on Facebook, Web and Mobile
msnNOW Homepage — The homepage highlights top trends, biggest movers and topic tabs. — Click here to view this gallery. — One of the Web's oldest portals, MSN, is about to dive headfirst into one of the Internet's hottest trends: Social Media.
Context & Ripple Effects
MSN, one of the Web's oldest portals, has been reworking its presence beyond the desktop since Microsoft's new-look MSN for mobile phones back in 2007; msnNOW extends that push into social, surfacing top trends, biggest movers and topic tabs across Facebook, the web and mobile simultaneously.
The timing matters on Facebook's side of the ledger: the launch lands days after Facebook confirmed it would bring Timeline profiles to brands at its February 29 marketer conference, so MSN is plugging into the platform at exactly the moment Facebook is courting publishers and advertisers.
First-order effects
- MSN's homepage shifts function from a curated editorial front page to a live trend tracker, putting 'biggest movers' data where its portal audience used to find hand-picked headlines.
- Facebook gains a high-traffic third-party surface built directly on its activity streams, deepening its role as the distribution layer beneath a legacy media brand.
Second-order effects
- Rival portals face pressure to bolt real-time social trend modules onto their own homepages or cede the 'what is the internet talking about' entry point to MSN and the platforms feeding it.
- Microsoft now has two social-data fronts — msnNOW on the consumer side and its broader Bing properties — raising internal questions about where trending-topic features should live.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, portal economics tilt further from editorial packaging toward algorithmic aggregation licensed from platform APIs, leaving Facebook and similar networks as the tollbooths between audiences and publishers.
The trend: Legacy web portals are rebuilding themselves as real-time social-trend aggregators, renting relevance from platform APIs they no longer control.