MySpace has problems, what about me?

The key to success — make your site as ugly as possible…Vitamin Features » The MySpace problem:

When it comes to some of the web’s most popular sites — is their success because of or in spite of ‘ugly’ design?In his 2004 AIGA magazine piece It’s Good to Be Bad, David Volgler observed a troub­ling trend in web design. Pointing to six popular but ugly websites (including the infamous hampster dance site) Volgler said he’s “haunted by a troub­ling question: does a website have to be well-​​designed to be popular?” The six sites that Volgler mentions are all, by any reas­on­able aes­thetic judgment, ugly. Even worse, they’re annoying. But does ugly and annoying mean poorly-​​designed?

Robert Scoble recently raised a similar point con­cerning Craigslist, MySpace, and Google. He sug­gested that in some cases ugly sites are more appealing than pretty ones because they are more authentic, less com­mer­cial, and look like they were done for love instead of money. Here Scoble ques­tions a major tenet of design by sug­gesting that ugly is not only not bad design, but good design.