MySpace and Citysearch are jointly announcing MySpace Local this morning, a new MySpace property that brings Citysearch business listings directly into the MySpace community. According to Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington, who just broke the story, MySpace Local will launch in private beta this week, with a public launch in the United States in April.
Plenty of people have written off MySpace to Facebook and Citysearch to Yelp, but regardless, this is a big deal. MySpace Local will eventually include all Citysearch business listings, but will start off with restaurants, bars, and and “nightlife” listings. Listings will be syndicated to MySpace Local’s listing pages, including addresses, maps, hours of operation, etc., and MySpace users will be able to rate and review restaurants. When a user first logs in to MySpace Local the first thing they’ll see is rating and reviews from their MySpace friends. This is great. Not only does it make relevant information immediately visible to each user, but there is a Twitter-like real-time feel to it making information timely as well.
All listings are broken down into city pages for all major US cities with integrated local search functionality as well. Aside from the added traffic MySpace Local will bring to the MySpace domain in general, ‘city pages’ is where the dollars will flow in. Now instead of massive national advertisers with big budgets exclusively funding the initiative, smaller local advertisers will be able to bid on ad space as well. And you can bet that’s exactly what they’ll do.
The benefits to both companies are immediately apparent. In addition to Citysearch’s recent Facebook Connect integration which syndicates reviews and ratings to Facebook profiles, it’ll now have a visibly branded integration into the world’s second largest social network. And it’s likely that MySpace Local will add a large chunk of revenue to the coffers of both companies via an undisclosed revenue-sharing agreement.
Potentially more interesting to the readers of GPS Obsessed is planned integration in MySpace mobile products. With real-time Citysearch activity integrated into the MySpace activity feed, there’ll be all kinds of opportunity for real-world social interactions.
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