13th February, 2006 —

As I toiled in the blinding glare of sun-bathed February snowdrifts this morning, disinterring my car from its glittering wintry tomb, my thoughts drifted, as one might expect under the circumstances, to MySpace.

(This is where you’re saying, “Wait a minute, Chucky. Don’t think you can slip this past so easily as that. You’ve been MIA since August; where have you been?” Among a myriad of excuses I could give, the only one that comes close to actually justifying my absence is that I’ve started writing a novel of my own. I’m still working on it. I don’t really expect it to go anywhere, but so far I’m having a lot of fun, and who knows? Maybe someone will pay me to turn it into paper airplanes.)

To call MySpace the newest internet fad is to put it on the same level as Mahir the “I Kiss You” guy and the wedding dress guy, when in fact those guys have way more depth. MySpace is more like an overnight sensation, and is going to be with us for a lot longer.

The idea behind MySpace is so simple and ingenious that it goes without saying I didn’t come up with it. The guys who did, on the other hand, definitely stumbled onto something: a half dozen or so vodka tonics is my guess. After consuming these beverages, the sea-churning brainstorm that gave birth to MySpace came in the form of a conversation that I imagine went kind of like this:

Wilbur: “I have more friends than you do.”

Orville: “No, I have more!”

Wilbur: “No, I have more!”

Orville: “No, I have more!”

Naturally, neither could let himself get shown up by the other in front of his bar buddies. So they both began to count off their friends. Gradually their efforts to one-up each other escalated to the point where they started asking people to be counted among their friends whom they didn’t even know. That’s when it hit them: why shouldn’t everybody be able to call dozens of total strangers their friends?

And MySpace was born.

On MySpace, hundreds of thousands of people join in a large-scale virtual Wall Street of friendship, striving to boost their portfolio of friends in a quest for bragging rights, even if it means that 90% of those in their list are people they’ve never spoken to in their lives…not even on MySpace.

Even better, the site recently added a feature called “Top 8″, where users can reserve the posh luxury box right on their main page for the octet of friends they like best, allowing them to play favorites like never before. That’s right: thanks to MySpace you can now track, with mathematical precision, on a minute-to-minute basis, exactly where you rank in importance in your friends’ lives!

Not everything about MySpace is frivolous. It does make for an easy one-stop template for web design and blogging, so you can effortlessly make your own webpage which is just as ugly as any you could make yourself, without need to decode the arcane, intangible cipher of html.

I know, I know: you love MySpace, and I make it sound so hopelessly farcical and shallow. Well, first of all, it is farcical and shallow. And second, I’m right there with you. The whole concept behind the site is mindless and superficial and I love it.

In fact, here’s my own personal MySpace page. As you can see, I don’t have nearly enough stranger-friends, so take a quick peek and make a friend request! I’ve got this bet with a guy at the other end of the bar, you see…