They could have done it like Wordpress does ... i.e. here's dozens of templates to choose from; then you can customize the colors, and the banner, and you can choose your preferred right-side widgets.
This is actually one thing that's annoying me about Facebook - all pages are boring AND filed with tons of shitty statuses and app invites ; I don't bother logging in anymore, unless I get a comment or something to one of my own status updates (that's coming in from my Twitter's iPhone Client).
I think this was one of the reasons MySpace originally took off. It was Geocities++. Once the current concept of social networking was adopted they should have started restricting user creativity...
Allow a lot of customization and freedom, but don't allow them to break the basic contract of civility and the neighborliness of not having sound play on a page, or a ton of animated garbage that slows everything down and no organization whatsoever.
I mean, we don't let the average driver design roads or cars, so why would we let them completely rewrite a webpage? If they're actually good at it, they should be able to express that talent though, in some fashion.
If you don't give people an outlet for something they'll find or make one! But it's a fine balance. And finding it takes talent too.
Even twitter does that! Yet we are yet to see horrendous profile pages on Twitter. Reasons:
1) Twitter crowd is "relatively sober" (no data to prove this).
2) Twitter does not go all out on the options. The tools are limited to a huge extent with a majority of page still covered by tweets esp in the new design. Hence less chance of the user to play their part.
I could be wrong, but Twitter doesn't allow custom CSS, cursor changes, scroll tags, and it doesn't let you blast horrible horrible music in the faces of their readers. That, to me, is a plus.
It's a little weird since I prefer to give the users as much control as allowable when I write applications for them... but this has shown me that sometimes great power is not always treated with great responsibility :)
Twitter lets you change only the colours and the background. The rest of the page elements are the same across every profile.
MySpace let you change anything and everything, because it allowed custom HTML and CSS. There are plenty of examples where entirely different types of profiles were used, including Flash ones, which could be used with little more than copying and pasting HTML and CSS, e.g. http://www.flaashy.com/index.php?m=Layouts&e=view&id....
I have seen some pretty poorly done twitter pages. At least they didn't take it to the level that myspace did with flaming text, music, videos, pictures, and embedded objects all on one page sometimes playing simultaneously with no visible controls.
And most of the interaction with twitter is rarely done with the userpage. I visit twitter.com, maybe, 20 times a month. The rest of the time its used through an intelligently designed app.
The difference is that such customization is for the individual and rarely seen by others, whereas with myspace such customization was on a landing page that a lot of other people would see. It's also much less limited than the degree of awfulness you could inflict with myspace.
