[thespin]

To understand why MySpace was designed like it was, perhaps it's helpful to look at the man behind the orginal MySpace: it's the guy behind Demand Media.

They own the domain name registrar eNom and Google SEO operations like eHow.

His idea is to churn out millions of pages of primarily machine-generated "content".

Very little human input is required.

This is enough to fool the search engine that it's what people want. Because the generated pages reflect what the search data says people are searching for.

But as anyone who has opened one of these pages knows, it has a certain "feel" to it. It vacuous. It's cheap.

It's also effective.

He earns a few pennies by having gotten you to look at the page, and once that's done, it matters little what you do or what you think next. Mission accomplished. In the aggregate, this design makes him money.

If you understand how a company like eNom makes money it also arguably fits with this sort of mass production idea.

It may be that MySpace was designed around the idea of mass production of "user-generated" pages. As a sort of fly trap to catch web surfers and searchers, similar to the way eHow or eNom would. Get users to help generate the pages. Not much input is needed. Just a little.

This is just how I see it. I could be wrong.