No Snivelling

As a net senior citizen (nearing age 40) I admit that the MySpace phenomenon has nicely passed me by.  I’ve done my best to set up a page but I avoided spending much time on it.  Like this website, it was more a place to experiment with how it worked and who was using it.  However, as JibJab has begun to experiment with fostering our own MySpace comedy page, I’ve been struck by its genius.  I’ve made the comment before that “isn’t this just Geocities all over again?”, and by that I meant to say that it was all a bit of a sham of a website building environement.  I couldn’t be more wrong.  What’s genius about MySpace is how it absolutely removes the need to have any technical skills to create a place all your own and connect (and stay connected to) with others– that differs significantly from Geocities because Geocities was all ultimately about trying to encourage people to create their own website (and therefore, required learning HTML and other technical tools).  Geocities forgot that that wasn’t their customer’s primary motivation.  Rather, it was a bit of innocent vanity.  MySpace takes innocent vanity and interconnectedness to levels never seen before.  Now, if I could just learn how to set my VCR (oh… a VCR is a machine you hook up to your television to watch video tapes… oh… never mind… I’ll go check out Florida timeshares now… anyone have the number for the early bird special?)