I was talking about this last week. I called it the MySpace/stylesheet paradox. MySpace got it wrong, Facebook and Gmail got it right.
> In the days of MySpace, people would tweak their personal profile so it was presented to every visitor using the colors, sounds, typeface, text size, and other styles that the profile owner found most pleasing. This gets it exactly backwards: out of everybody's opinions about what a user's profile needs, it's the profile owner's opinion which matters the least. After all, the profile owner doesn't spend his or her time reading his or her own profile—the profile is for other people, and we can see this by looking at what the profile owner does do, which is to spend his or her time reading everybody else's profiles.
> it's the profile owner's opinion which matters the least
I kind of disagree that this is the reason. Conceptually it would be great if the owner could express what they want to.
I think the bigger reason was a combination of UI inconsistency as well as the simple fact that 99.9% people can't design a webpage that looks good. Their font, color, and style choices just plain suck, and make the entire website look bad. This model did not bring out the best in the non-designer crowd.
It's like giving a piano to a non-pianist and asking them to perform. What do you expect?
