I like how humble Tom is about MySpace. All these years later, and he's still my only friend...
In all seriousness, he should be proud of what they accomplished. Yes, it kind of turned into a cesspool, but there was no model of how a social network should be until Facebook came along. MySpace was an evolution of Geocities, more than it was an attempt to have the kind of "respectable" social presence that facebook shot for. MySpace was still the startup that proved social would be huge.
Rather, there was no widespread knowledge and/or consensus on how a social network should be at the time. Models were a plenty. For example, Lunarstorm started out some 3 years (2000) before MySpace and in a year (2001) reached 600k users (it would plateau at 1.2m in 2007) but it had none of the Geocities stylings of MySpace. Instead it had a feed of your friends' activities, private messaging, notes (called diary), and message boards. It's just that the Internet back then was not the sharing ground it has grown into today, and people in other countries than Sweden were probably not aware of this particular site.
In all seriousness, he should be proud of what they accomplished. Yes, it kind of turned into a cesspool, but there was no model of how a social network should be until Facebook came along. MySpace was an evolution of Geocities, more than it was an attempt to have the kind of "respectable" social presence that facebook shot for. MySpace was still the startup that proved social would be huge.