So there’s been some unanimous disdain heaped upon MySpace’s attempt at creating a social news site — and with good reason too. Its layout is confusing. There’s no comments. You can’t submit news. And the automagical news aggregating algorithms like to pick up splogs for some reason, apparently. The only social part is the voting on the news.

Here’s the thing: Is anyone actually using it?

No, I don’ t mean reading the “news” that’s there. I mean, actually voting on the news? Because as I check this out, all of the news items are in the single digits. The kind of bushleague activity I would expect on a pagerank zero Digg / Netscape / Reddit clone running Pligg kind of numbers — not with one of the most highly trafficked properties on the web. You’d think that a sliver of spillover from their main page would drive usage of this frankenstein of a social “experiment” through the roof.

So, why is this?

Its pure conjecture at the moment, but I doubt that enough MySpacers would be as sophisticated enough to be knowledgeable about other social news sites to effectively compare — and therefore “vote” for how successful MySpace News is by effectively not participating (which, is what I suspect most of *you* all out there are doing — or, not doing, as it were).

Rather, I do wonder whether or not the intended users have a hard time figuring out what this attempt at “social” news is all about, and what their role in it is.  Or, even if they’re interested in using social news.   Which is a rather astounding inference to make out of this “millenial” generation.

Because if that’s true, it follows that by improving layout, design and functionality could *help*, but even in the face of massive traffic numbers, it might not actually take off.

Remember one of the fundamental differences with existing social news sites and MySpace news, is that social news sites are autonomous sites, whose traffic willingly reads, participates, and uses their sites.  Its stating the obvious, but people who are there *want* to be there.  MySpace News is trying to graft a social news model (albeit a crippled and lame version of one) onto a population of users who might not understand or want to consume news in this way.  

There will be some who claim that a sliver of MySpace’s population using MySpace News will make it a mover and shaker.  That may be the case.  But I’ll submit that the percentage that might want to use it will probably *already* know about other news sites, find those better and use those.  MySpace’s real challenge is to try and convert the masses who don’t yet know about social news into actually using MySpace’s own version of this kind of news.

While they may have flubbed ver 1.0 of MySpace News, it will take a great deal more than just adding features to make MySpace News a go of it.  If I’m right, it may require MySpace to evangelize this *kind* of news to its audience — which will be, in fact, a great deal harder, and a job that will require a great deal more finesse than simply throwing money at it.