It's probably doable, but you'll have to go far, far beyond shell scripts. I see three steps.
Step one: learn C, and learn about network programming.
A good, thorough C tutorial:
http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cclass/
There are several good online tutorials for network programming. Here's one:
http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/
... but if you get really hip deep into network programming, you're eventually going to want to spring a few bucks and get volume 1 of _Unix Network Programming_, by W. Richard Stevens. He's dead now, but he was a giant in the field. The latest edition of this book is written by others, but the book is still under his name. The publisher is Addison-Wesley.
Step two in this process is to do what I did:
Learn a little about web proxies. Then download the source for a relatively simple web proxy, rip out what isn't interesting, and rewrite the rest to fit your style. Add a capability to log to disk all traffic that goes back and forth (perhaps all traffic under only certain conditions, so you're not examining tons of unrelated data).
Sounds outrageous? I did it, and learned a lot.
Learn about web proxies here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_server
The proxy I chose, after looking at several, was privoxy:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/privoxy/
Step three: configure your web browser to go through your modified proxy, go to myspace to get the information you need, figure out how myspace sends that data back and forth, and then write your own specialized client in C.
This specialized client will probably never save you enough time to make up for all the time you spent doing what I suggested, but you'll learn a lot along the way.
Hope this helps.