MySpace done the right way, the AJAX way

I'm impressed, but maybe I'm easily impressed. In fact, I've been out of the loop as to new web products. The latest big thing I encountered was Flickr. Flickr and its extensive use of AJAX - just the in situ edition of photo titles/descriptions is woaw-inducing. Like, seriously, how could you *not* have thought of that before? It's not even so complicated to make work, but I suppose it would be a little harder to optimize it. The problem with this sort of application (at least the problem I bog myself with) is how do you handle large scale deployments, so to make best use of bandwidth and that sort of thing? I am indeed one of those people who would do anything to strip down the code as much as possible to try and save on bandwidth costs.

MySpace, I don't know (but I do), is the summum of bad taste, the nightmare of a standards-conscious web developer. And the worst of it is that it dates of 2005, and people will keep using it, b/c they don't know better - or they don't realize that there could be better. People like my brother, who's not dumb at all (<3), who's using a clone of LJ (GJ), b/c it does what he needs his journal to do: be able to save pics and share them with his friends. And he's likely to stay there, bicauze all of his friends are also on GJ. It's mind-boggling that the success of MySpace does not reside in the raw quality of the product, but rather on *who* uses the product. In fact, not so mind-boggling when you consider that celebrities, people associated with the brand, has always made the success of a product.