Pretty spiffy, Tom! FaceBook ain’t got shit on what you guys have now. I definitely prefer MySpace over FaceBook (which annoys the @#$@!# out of me on a daily basis) now.

Pretty wins! At least it does for me. Especially combined with the spammy nature of FaceBook and the fact that FaceBook’s management are a bunch of pricks.

Opinionated: FaceBook’s got nothing on this stuff!

So, if we first put aside for a moment Marco’s, erm, ‘opinionated’ view on Facebook’s organisation — doubly so since MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who’s not exactly heaven’s most famous angel. I’m getting an odd feeling of deja vù.

There are two strands to this. First is the web development exercise of creating a MySpace page, and second is the perceived appeal of MySpace vs. Facebook.

First, the web development exercise of designing within crazy constraints (such as MySpace) remains somewhat valid. Although if anything, MySpace switching to rich (nay, verbose) well structured mark-up takes away a great number of those constraints. I mean, building something beautiful from table layout, hacktastic CSS injection and image replacement is a pretty awesome challenge. Theming a well structured module system seems kinda tame if you were to do it for the sake of it.

Whether this affects the appeal of the service causes me most complaint. A critical reason for Facebook’s success is that you can’t theme it. Because not everyone is as irritatingly good as Marco. Give people the keys to build something beautiful, you give them the keys to put an animated Miley Cyrus fuchsia-flower-tastic backdrop. And Comic Sans.

Yes, Facebook’s uniform blues are becoming blander to us as time goes on. But when it got big, it was a breath of fresh air to be able to read the content your friends produced. New MySpace, same as the old MySpace, isn’t going to make that any better. Facebook valued the function of content over visual customisation, and on that ground they won a lot of people’s respect.