I’ve noticed an interesting trend in online communities and social software. It seems that quality of design and usability of a site is inversly proportional to the number of people who use it.
That is, in a situation where more than one tool/site exists to serve a similar market… the ugliest, most unusable one will ultimately attract the more users than the aesthically beautiful, super intuituve ones. Think MySpace versus Facebook. Delicious versus Magnolia. ModelMayhem versus ModelLaunch. Flickr versus Photobucket/TextAmerica are the only notable exceptions. Whaddya think?