I don't like MySpace
It seems like everybody does MySpace nowadays. Consequently, MySpace is making an absolute killing in ad revenue and is worth billions of dollars. But despite all of that, it still looks like somebody's pet web project run out of their garage.
I'm the type of person that is hard to impress when it comes to a company's web presence. If you're supposed to be a tech company, but you have a shitty web site (poorly built, poor use of technologies, poor adherence to best practices), I'm going to think your IT department produces shitty work, and that completely undermines your appearance as a technically competent company.
But I can forgive that in certain situations. If someone has a really great idea, and executes on a low budget, I can understand that it's more important to get your idea out there than it is to do everything correctly. But how many years does it take before you revisit some of these decisions? How many billions of dollars does your company have to be worth before you can start investing in a web development staff that isn't producing stuff that could be confused with a high school computer science class project?
To start with, the standard MySpace page is visually horrible. The only redeeming quality seems to be a semi-consistent use of color. The fonts are differently sized and differently spaced. Nothing lines up. All I want to do when I look at my page is figure out how I can fix it.
The "good" news is that you sort of can. By embedding <style> tags within your text blocks, you can alter the presentation of the page. But I get the distinct impression that this was an oversight, not a feature, and they just let it continue to work because so many people like it. "So great," I think, "I'll just make the page look like I want it to look."
That's where the next issue appears: the markup is horrible. It's one nested table within another. There's no use of semantic markup whatsoever. No headings, no semantic blocks, no nothing. You have class names like "orangetext15", and instead of margins and padding, you have spaces moving things around. So great, you can change the font and some colors, but you can't make any meaningful, targeted changes to the layout without using some advanced CSS selectors, which the majority of browsers don't support. Consequently, the best style sheet to use is the one the layout was originally designed for: the default.
The second issue is that they aren't really embracing any new technologies. My list of MySpace "friends", bulletins, messages, etc., could trivially be exposed as a syndication feed (Atom/RSS), but they don't do that. No, you don't get the ad hits, but don't you think a "MySpace messages" or "MySpace friends" list on another web site might just drive traffic there?
MySpace reminds me of someone's jaw-dropping, grandiose PhD thesis: Good idea, good implementation, but totally abandoned after the payoff. It's running on autopilot just when it has the most opportunity to do some really cool things.