Evan Williams (Odeo CEO and Pyra/Blogger co-founder) has an interesting post up about the fading significance of pageview and hit counts in determining the reach and influence of websites. Ajax, RSS and widgets have something to do with it, argues Ev — but so does crappy design that effectively forces the user to clickclickclick many times to accomplish a task that leaner design would permit in just a single click. Crappy design like you'll find on MySpace. Snip:
Pageview counts are as suseptible as hit counts to site design decisions that have nothing to do with actual usage. As Mike Davidson brilliantly analyzed in April, part of the reason MySpace drives such an amazing number of pageviews is because their site design is so terrible. As Mike writes: "Here's a sobering thought: If the operators of MySpace cleaned up the site and followed modern interface and web application principles tomorrow, here's what the graph would look like:
Read Ev's entire post here.
Sean Bonner did, and responds with a post observing that "MySpace Can Eat a Bag of Dick." And indeed they can, but it'll take them 20 times more clicks to accomplish the task.
