Now I’ve said before that I’m not against trends, and how they can be good for a particular industry, but seriously, how many social networks do we need? How can you be sure that your company’s “latest and greatest” social network will benefit an audience more than the 80+ million people on MySpace who already find it useful.

It just seems that with the few social networks that are huge right now, you would have to be pretty ballsy to spend big bucks on the resources in creating a new network. You would also have to offer the people something brilliant that they aren’t already getting on their current network. That gap seems to be closing swiftly.

So I can’t say that I’d be sad to see some of the social networks die out, or at least merge. How many social networks does the world need that all try to do the same thing? Aside from that, what would it take for a company to be successful if they wanted to join in and create a new social network?

Now I am not one to praise bad design, never, but I will give respect to success, and MySpace is just that. I am wrapping my head around the fact that not every successful site out there will look good. It’s as simple as that. So yes MySpace is ugly, however does this mean that it has a poor design? Hear me out first….

Design is not restricted to how “pretty” something looks, but rather it is how it functions, and how well it works with the users. With over 80 millions (and growing) users on the site, would you say that it is a successful design? Again, I am not praising ugly websites what-so-ever. What I am trying to do is separate the visual look of the site, from functionality. And yes the functionality isn’t perfect, but it obviously working well for, um, about 80 million registered users.

Why did it succeed? Well, everyone should be over the fact that MySpace did not succeed because of it’s looks, however, it did succeed because it allow the users to customize their own pages. It allows users to have their pages be an extension of their personality, and use the site as a social meeting ground. That’s what MySpace is, and does. It gets the job done, simple as that.

With that said, what would we say if 95% of the users of MySpace simply don’t care about the design of the site, rather just want their information and pages to “look cool?” What if they don’t see the things that we do, and they think it’s a great site, then who are we to say that the site doesn’t work well? Am I out of my mind?

I’d like to hear other opinions.