Blake Gopnik, the Washington Post's art critic, writes today that Facebook needs a facelift. He peers at the social networking site as an art critic, writing, "The Facebook page has neither gesture nor principle. It's just there, like the buzz of your computer's hard drive." He even has a design firm re-imagine an artsier Facebook — one that strips away most of the site's usability. The problem is, beyond the actual Facebook employees quoted in his article, no one Gopnik speaks to seems to understand Facebook.

Include Gopnik in that characterization, as well. His critique comes after just over three months of using the site. He joined on August 22, according to his profile, which is open to the public.

"That's what made me decide to write the story," says Gopnik of his scant time on the site, "Being shocked at the low aesthetic level... I was seeing it almost the way I would look at a painting.."

The profile pictures on Blake Gopnik's Facebook page.

Gopnik doesn't use Facebook the way a typical user does - his profile is sterile, and his only wall postings are of his "Pic of the day," from the Arts Post blog and his Tumblr, or his articles. He's only posted a status once: "Just stepped into the Met. After all these years of looking at art, how can it be that my heart STILL beats faster every time enter a great museum?" He's changed his profile picture 18 times since joining the site: the first photo is of him, and the remaining 17 are portraits by great masters such as Botticelli.

"I consider my Facebook page a professional page," he says. "I keep up with Tyler Green and people in the museum world. I have a Tumblr and I feed that through to my page, I let people keep up with me. Every once in a while, my mother sends me a message."

Though Gopnik thinks that Facebook needs a design upgrade, few of the sources he interviews for his story even agree with him, at first. Facebook's function over form aesthetic works just fine for the site, Facebook designer Adam Mosseri tells him. "We actually spend a lot of time designing the lack of presence," he says. "Would we want people to come to Facebook and say, 'This is something beautiful,' or 'This is something well executed'?" National Design Award-winner Stephen Doyle tells Gopnik, "sometimes the job of design is just to get you safely across the road. ... If [Facebook] had a real wowy design, I think we'd say, 'Get out of here, Facebook.'" When prompted, he says that the icons are cluttered, and that blue is boring, and that it's too cookie-cutter. Paddy Harrington, design director of Bruce Mau Design, calls Facebook "The purest form a certain kind of evil that we have in our collective culture right now," But he's not referring to the design — just to how addictive the site has become — which, if that's a goal of the site, the design seems to be serving its purpose quite well.

The new design suggested by Bruce Mau Design may take away some of the addictiveness of Facebook by rendering it less useful — a design that Harrington decided upon based on his own inability to curb his time on the site. The firm keeps the boring blue sterility that Doyle dislikes, but re-imagines the site's main page with a newsfeed reduced to showing only three items at a time (despite it being one of the most popular features of the site), and instead, a grid of your 20 best "real friends" to make it easier to keep up with them.

If that sounds familiar, look at the bottom of any MySpace page, where you can list your top friend in a grid. It's also suggested by Doyle that users could customize the background of their pages, another hallmark of MySpace. Like this. "Why doesn't my Facebook have a fake-wood surround? ... Your image choice is completely different from mine, so why do we both have a blue box on our page?" Doyle asks. Just two weeks ago, MySpace announced that it was no longer a social network, but an "entertainment hub."

Gopnik says he has never used MySpace, though he's familiar with it, and knows that it has lost the race with Facebook.

"I don't judge the aesthetic quality of something by how popular it is," says Gopnik. "The fact that MySpace is failing to Facebook doesn't tell you it has better design. MySpace allowed too much design. Users could make it uglier."

But in social networking, design and usability are inextricably linked. Changing the design of a social networking site affects the way that users consume information, the time they spend on the site, and the way they communicate with others, which directly affects its popularity — a fact that neither Gopnik nor Bruce Mau Design seem to understand. As for whether or not he liked the mock design, Gopnik remained neutral.

"I asked them to do what they thought was best," says Gopnik. "It's not ready to be judged in any way. It's a conceptual piece. The goals behind it seem admirable to me and resolve some of the problems, but they don't resolve the sheer visual issue."

While Facebook users might converse the most with their real friends on the site, one of the reasons it has become so popular is the voyeuristic thrill we get from peeking into the lives of people we may have only known long ago. We need a Facebook where we can stumble upon our 10th grade lab partner's wedding pictures. Facebook needs that kind of a Facebook, too, because that's what drives its meteoric traffic. But this is not that Facebook — it's a new skin for the kind of social media site that Facebook's ugliness has long since mercilessly crushed. It's a Facebook design for people who want to use Facebook less.