There's fashion in everything from fashion, through web design to science. I think the clean, sans-serify, widely spaced design grew to prominence in part as a reaction to busy, link-heavy corporate/portal sites and for a time it looked friendly, clean and simple. Now it's so common it manages to also look generic and corporate. The visual design has also become a bit a bit of a habit, at the expense of usability. It doesn't always work.
Compare loopt to, say, Flightcaster. Loopt is clean, good-looking and entirely uninformative. What does Loopt do? Why should you be eager to 'partner with' them? Flightcaster is busy, typographically sinful and yet answers the sort of questions you might have if you've never heard of Flightcaster. And you can try it right there and then.
I agree. I went to loopt and I had no idea what the product is. I don't have an iphone so I was about to just leave but I hit browse and found that it seems to be a yellow pages thing with a map, but there are only like 10 entries total for my area. I now have ZERO desire ever to return to this site even if I do get an iphone. Flight caster on the other hand explains what it is, if I ever need to use it.
i think this is an apples to oranges comparison. i don't know for sure, but flightcaster is probably only building one product for a couple of mobile devices.
loopt on the other hand has been around for a while and has 4 different products (loopt, star, pulse, mix). each one has a different purpose, serves different markets, and pairs up with different devices. you can imagine where the challenge is at: you have 4 things--which one do you want to say first, and how do you want to say it? and risk confusing someone by showing too much about the other 3 too quickly.
i think a better comparison is to someone like zynga or panic, where there are several products developed for several markets. it's an interesting problem when people who aren't aware of your various apps fail to understand fundamentally what your company does. google is still a search company, and their home page still shows a search box, but they don't spend any time explaining any of their other products on their home page either. and yet their products still get used.
Compare loopt to, say, Flightcaster. Loopt is clean, good-looking and entirely uninformative. What does Loopt do? Why should you be eager to 'partner with' them? Flightcaster is busy, typographically sinful and yet answers the sort of questions you might have if you've never heard of Flightcaster. And you can try it right there and then.