Microsoft recently released the newly revamped MSN.com to the public; within this redesign is the ability to announce breaking new alerts with a banner across the top of the page. These breaking news alerts will use tweets from credible news sources to deliver recent information.
Around 425 million people visit MSN.com each month. MSN is a web portal, so it shows a large variety of information such as news, stocks, celebrity gossip, and sports. In addition to news, MSN also offers quick access to user’s email, OneNote, and recent documents and photos on OneDrive.
To make the news aggregating even more enticing to users, MSN will now offer breaking news alerts. These news alerts are generated from popular tweets from reputable news sources such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNN, etc. Some tweets may even come directly from sources such as celebrities, governments, eyewitnesses, or other organizations.
By linking directly to the tweets MSN users can quickly jump to twitter and stay up to date on the event. By following hashtags users can connect with other news sources or commentaries; this is good from driving traffic to twitter, and these MSN users may not be Twitter users which will help expose more new users to twitter.
Microsoft is trying to make MSN a modern and useful site where users can start their day and will keep returning and remain on the site. Features like these breaking news alerts is useful in generating the fear of missing out. Users may be more inclined to stay on the site because they worry about missing out on the wave of breaking news. Staying on MSN.com will be comparable to leaving CNN on all day for the modern internet connected generation.
