If you’ve been thinking that the Internet could use another portal for celebrity news and gossip, you’re in luck. Meet Wonderwall, the newest iteration of the same old hot wind.
Wionderwall, which comes from Microsoft’s MSN network in partnership with BermanBraun, is set up like a voyeur’s dream: looking through the celebrity pics and hair-raising headlines is just like flipping the pages of a magazine, staring at a wall of televisions, or peeking through private windows. Scroll your cursor over one of these peeps into public lives and a small blurb of text describes what you’re getting yourself into.
Click on a window and the entire wall opens up into a single “article” (they’re only a paragraph long and mostly photographs). A scroll bar at the bottom of the Wonderwall cycles you through the different windows and returns you to the home page when you’ve had enough.
Wonderwall comes during a time of celebrity gossip glut. The market is seemingly full, with sites like TMZ, PerezHilton, and others, but MSN doesn’t think it’s coming into the game too late. MSN General Manager Rob Bennett tells the Washington Post that MSN isn’t playing catch-up with the rest of the gossip industry, but rather consolidating its information into one attractive package. Bennett says the content is there; it’s just scattered, and Wonderwall exists to bring it all together.
With Microsoft’s money behind the deal, the Post asks why MSN didn’t just buy PerezHilton.com. Apparently the idea was discussed at the MTV Video Music Awards, but Bennett chose a different path. “If we wanted to do Perez, we could have done that with existing resources. We wanted to build out more than just a blog,” he said. Plans for the site include increased interactivity in the form of comments and videos.
(And by the way, good luck getting the Oasis song out of your head.)