Facebook has always been known for its clean, minimal look, and the fact that it does not allow users to spice up their stylesheets with their own colors or themes (a sometimes-praised, oft-lamented feature of Myspace, since it leads to many garish and hideous creations). The advent of the Facebook app platform has allowed for a much greater customizability of the user profile, but the overall look and feel remains guarded by Facebook. In fact, Facebook does their best to handicap style options on the part of app developers, and rewrites all style declarations so that they affect only the space occupied by the app itself.

Today, some clever (and humorous) hackers have found a way around this restriction, and have created an app which lets you style your page as a whole. This is almost certainly going to be banned by Facebook, if it hasn’t already by the time of posting, so experiment with it while you can. I successfully made my page ugly by turning the whole background a dull grey, but the possibilities for horror are endless, as evidenced by the screenshot below. The app is tongue-in-cheekily called I CAN HAS A MYSPACE PLZ and was clearly made for a few laughs at the expense of some hole found in Facebook’s style-protection system. The app is designed to “bring the opportunity for eyebleeding self-expression from the Murdoch Empire to the (formerly) clean, cool land of Facebook.”

It does that. To dubious effect. Here are a few examples:

Facebook seems already very invested in controlling its look, so it will be interesting to see how it responds to apps like this.

UPDATE: As expected, Facebook has removed this app, and I received this word on the app from the developer: “It took advantage of a loophole in Facebook that allowed random code to be executed. Obviously I chose to use it for a non-malicious purpose, and was planning on letting Facebook know this morning about the loophole. My account has just been disabled, which is disappointing and I do hope it gets re-enabled soon as I have many (much, more legitimate) project ideas on the way for the Facebook Platform.”
[tags]facebook,apps,myspace,css,style[/tags]