I got off in my previous post about how much the app-maker leeches upset me at this conference, and so I feel like I should mention who I was most impressed with there. It was totally the guy from MySpace.

I don’t remember the guy’s name or even his title, but he was good. I even shook his hand afterward and specifically thanked him for not being evil. And I’m not a MySpace guy. I have an account, but it gets used about as much as my Twitter account – that is to say, not at all. I’m sure I’ll touch on my feelings about Twitter soon.

As much as I’ve always not cared for MySpace, and made fun of the kind of people who do, here’s a company that has had its head on straight. While Facebook has been running around, trying to reinvent themselves for every new highest bidder, MySpace has been straight as an arrow. Their profiles are still the same customizable mess that artistic young folks get into. They still focus on music. And they’re still reaching their same core market in a big way, still kicking Facebook’s butt in the numbers.

The fella that presented at the conference was a good representative of that, too. In a room full of bloodthirsty app developers, he told them that apps were going to have to be approved by MySpace first. He told them that MySpace wasn’t going to give them the spam tools that Facebook did. He told them that they were launching without any messaging API at all, and even as they tore his still-beating heart from his now-limp, lifeless body, he stood his ground and told them that MySpace had learned from the mistakes of others

It was cool. They got shown.

Funny how Facebook, who used to be the clean, sophisticated, unspammy one, has jumped the shark and now I’m writing positive stuff about MySpace.