I’ve tried. I really have. I installed phpWiki on my own server, and used it for a curriculum development project that it was well suited to. I’ve participated in the wiki-based development of content hosted at Socialtext for the emergent democracy and social software groups.

I love their functionality. I really do. It’s very very cool to be able to do “ridiculously easy” collaborative document editing.

But…let’s face it. They’re ugly.

I’m not a shallow person. Really. (Well, maybe a little shallow. But that’s not the point.) I do, however, respond better to web pages that are well designed and pleasant to look at. And wiki pages aren’t. Even with phpWiki, which lets me choose from a variety of layout schemes, I can’t do anything to make them better without changing everything on every page. I can’t apply styles selectively. I can’t put things in fixed-size divs so that they don’t spread all the way out across the page.

You can spot a wiki page a mile a way. They all look exactly like the pages that my students used to turn out in basic HTML classes back in 1995. All they’re missing are the rainbow-colored bars to replace the ubiquitous horizontal rules.

I had somewhat high hopes for Hydra when I first heard about it, but the documents I’ve seen output from it this week (like the notes Tom Coates et al created at EtCon) lose all the lovely color-coding and connection to people that the screen shots of the application show. (I wonder…does it work like iChat, which lets me save a chat and then reopen it as an iChat document with all the originally formatting intact? If I open a Hydra-generated document using Hydra, days after the shared editing is over, will it still show me the authors who participated?)

I’ve seen a sneak preview of an edit-this-page type of outliner that Marc Canter is working on, and I like it a lot better. Why? It doesn’t hurt to look at it, mostly. Silly? Maybe. But I know I’m not alone.

In fact, I’ve been thinking a lot about visuals in the context of social software lately, due in large part to Adam Greenfield’s recent post on Friendster. I’d been trying to figure out why I like Friendster, despite the many many things about it that I find problematic (a user interface that’s driven away several of my friends, the often obscene bbs messages that I’m forced to look at on the main page, the fact that I can’t see the last name of people who want me to acknowledge that we’re “really friends”, etc). Greenfield nails it: “Friendster’s ‘killer app’? The swelling joy that fills my heart every time I look at the pictures of these, my good friends. (Awwwwwww…).”

Such a little thing, right? Pictures of your friends on the main page? Surely he can’t be right. But then I thought about how much more I like iChat than any other IM client I’ve used. Pictures of my friends, again. In a clean, aesthetically pleasing window. And I thought, too, about the fact that I regularly return to Friendster’s main page, and look at my friends. (Twenty-three, at last count. And there’s even a smiling picture of the elusive burningbird in there!)

There’s a lesson in there for developers, I think. A theme that’s emerging. It’s not just about the software-enabled connections. It’s about the visualization of those connections, the personalization of those connections—and faces are an important piece of that.