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Reuters to take on MySpace

07 March 2007 Be the first to comment

Paul Penrose

Head of Research

Finextra

Reuters is working on plans to develop a professional networking service for fund managers, traders and analysts.

Pitching the project to Guardian journalists as a “version of MySpace for the financial services community”, Reuters’ Web 2.0-bedazzled CEO Tom Glocer adds: "It won't have the latest hot videos and the 'why I am into Metallica and the Arctic Monkeys' blogs. Instead we are going to give our financial services users the ability to post their research or if they are traders, their trading models."

Sounds to me like a logical extension of Reuters’ existing Instant Messaging service dressed up in trendy new Web 2.0 clothing. Glocer says the service will be offered exclusively to Reuters’ 70,000 financial services subscribers. "People don't want to have 100 friend requests from teenage girls in Florida if they are trading the credit derivatives market,” he says.

Er, I wouldn’t be so sure about that.

Let’s hope that Reuters’ corporate push into MySpace territory is a bit more convincing than Tom’s personal experimentation with the online communications medium. The Tom Glocer CEO blog seems to exist merely to demonstrate that Citizen Tom is either too busy to blog, or that he just doesn’t get it, or possibly both.