Well, some observations from the ever-observant Marshall Kirkpatrick, filtering through Mike Arrington and a few others, that MySpace News is teh dead. Or, something close to it. Crickets chirping, the slow silent death of unusage and all that rot.

This is absolutely no surprise.

I think part of the blame has to do with its poor user interface, and its premise as a half-baked social news - aggregating tool where users could only vote on news that was gathered/scraped/pre-approved, and not, for example, submit news.

I think the other part of the blame is just the users.

MySpace News, just like its upcoming video channels, are all brand extensions of a sort. Except that they don’t really make much sense to begin with, in so far as that MySpace, to many people who use it, doens’t “mean” News.

Yeah, I “get” that MySpace is “trying” something new. All that social media stuff — them kids are into it these days, right?

Except that, and this is entirely hypothetical and conjecture, I don’t think that MySpacers are the same kind of people who actively *use* social news.

I said it once a few weeks ago when it debuted, I still stand by it. The success of social news sites like Digg, Reddit and Netscape is that they were sure about their identity and their use — and people come *to* those sites for those reasons. Digg is the biggest, and I suspect, will remain the biggest, because it really had a significant first-mover advantage into that type of space.

MySpace is trying to graft a social news tool onto an existing social news site.

While I’m sure that MySpace New’s dismal failure has many different factors (such as, but not limited to, “where does a failure to promote MySpace News on MySpace” play into things), I do wonder about how many MySpacers know about, or even care about, the existence or usage of social news?

After all, the thought that MySpace could create a juggernaut in social news is only valid if, and only if, their population is predisposed to being keen to use it *anyway*.

I don’t have the data — but I suspect that they aren’t.

And if they aren’t, then no amount of fancifying the UI, or improving the mechanics, will really help it become anything but a third tier Digg clone.

You know — the kind that no one uses.