I find it surprising Craigslist is missing from this list.

If you take a closer look, all of given examples have really polished up their design over time as they became more and more successful (well... except myspace that is).

I used to work in a lumberyard with several insanely insensitive men. They had a saying which applies here that I will not repeat.

I think that the super slick look can actually hurt an app.

www.gowalla.com comes to mind.

Enormous cuddly looking stuff makes it hard for me to know where I'm supposed to focus.

I didn't use a few of these websites in the early days, but for the ones that I did, they had one thing in common. They were easy to use.