I think that's an overwhelmingly negative perspective. Facebook was (for me, at least) a draw initially because it wasn't drowning in crap like MySpace was. It was a locked down experience, and everyone benefitted from it. In all honesty, I don't see this as a dramatic move away from that idea.
The MySpace interface was an abomination. The fact that users would tolerate it says something about the standard one has to meet to hold an audience. It's not very high.
FB has a clean interface, generally, but it's what's going on "behind the scenes" that is at issue here.
I'm not sure why you got downvoted for calling the MySpace interface 'an abomination'. It's hard to find a better word for it.
MySpace was very weird in that it seemed like they didn't want you to alter your page. I know that statement seems odd, but there wasn't an easy way to do this. To make changes they didn't offer a UI to set up your own CSS or simply changes colors/backgrounds/etc without CSS, you essentially used JS injection on a couple fields to get the page to look like you wanted. If they had limited what people could do it, or gave them an easier avenue to do it, MySpace might not have lost as much traffic once the much 'prettier' Facebook came out.
To understand why MySpace was designed like it was, perhaps it's helpful to look at the man behind the orginal MySpace: it's the guy behind Demand Media.
They own the domain name registrar eNom and Google SEO operations like eHow.
His idea is to churn out millions of pages of primarily machine-generated "content".
Very little human input is required.
This is enough to fool the search engine that it's what people want. Because the generated pages reflect what the search data says people are searching for.
But as anyone who has opened one of these pages knows, it has a certain "feel" to it. It vacuous. It's cheap.
It's also effective.
He earns a few pennies by having gotten you to look at the page, and once that's done, it matters little what you do or what you think next. Mission accomplished. In the aggregate, this design makes him money.
If you understand how a company like eNom makes money it also arguably fits with this sort of mass production idea.
It may be that MySpace was designed around the idea of mass production of "user-generated" pages. As a sort of fly trap to catch web surfers and searchers, similar to the way eHow or eNom would. Get users to help generate the pages. Not much input is needed. Just a little.
The MySpace interface in and of itself was OK, especially for the time when it was made. It's what MySpace allowed users to do with it that was an abomination.
