The MySpace Problem

Joshua Porter asks:

"The most difficult part of the MySpace problem is that, despite what designers might think about it, and how they might have made it look, MySpace is actually a well-designed website. Who could argue with this? MySpace has grown faster than any site in the history of the Web, and in two short years garners nearly as much traffic as Yahoo! If that growth and popularity isn’t a metric of good design, then what is? "

Um, I will argue with that.  My metric of good design is my pissed-off-O-meter when I visit a page and try to do something.  If it stays at zero then  it's good design.  When I tried to use MySpace for the first time it shot to eleven.  Have you ever tried to use the thing?  I like to consider myself halfway intelligent, but I was dumbfounded when I tried to set up my profile and change my privacy preferences (shouldn't this be in big glowing red letters by now to keep lawsuits at bay?)

He goes on to write:

"Instead of wondering what MySpace could be, let’s learn from what it is."

This is like studying Shaq's free-throwing capabilities or his sneakers to try to copy his success.  Shaq is successful because he's big, and so is MySpace.  But they both have some pretty major flaws.  God help us all if this becomes the reference design that all Web sites aspire to, I might just stop using the Web to pursue simpler endeavors like figuring out a unified theory of physics.