MySpace Wants a Motorcycle and Some Sweet, Sweet Tats

It's never easy telling someone he/she has hit a mid-life crisis. Lucky for us, Sparkler hgjt55 is armed with plenty of evidence and a great sense of humor. Enjoy! —SparkNotes Editors

You're sitting at your computer scrolling contentedly through the daily feed on Facebook. After spending a good hour doing nothing but gaping at your peers' status updates, you decide to check up on your old friend MySpace.

As your fingers lazily dance across the keyboard, punching in all the appropriate letters, it occurs to you that MySpace was one of the first to kickstart the social networking craze. It's like when your parents helped you ride your first bicycle, but now you can ride with no training wheels, so who needs their help anymore?

Almost the same scenario happened with Mother MySpace. She taught us a couple of web tricks, succeeded in further complicating the intricate social rituals of teenagers, and now we’re all off to bigger and better websites like Facebook and Twitter.

As your homepage loads, you come to a startling realization: MySpace has copied almost all its new features from Facebook. It started with the status updates. Now you can even comment on updates. You look at the bottom of the screen to find a small strip of blue—it’s a chat box, just like on Facebook!

Irritation floods your brain. It’s like walking into your room to find your mom busting out of the sides of your favorite shirt and jeans as she protests that she was “simply trying on some hip new clothes.”

A moment later, however, the aggravation subsides. You suddenly see this whole ordeal in a new light: MySpace is going through a midlife crisis! You then laugh hysterically at the image of a 50-year-old Tom swaggering around in baggy jeans and a Zoo York shirt.

Seriously though, MySpace needs to start acting like the mature, elderly website that it is, because everyone can see through its desperate attempts to appeal to FB users. One little bite at a time, it is slowly chewing off every last feature it could possibly steal from FB. The new chat box, the status updates, the games you can play and challenge your friends…the list is endless. I wouldn’t be surprised if MySpace changed its entire layout and terms of use to mirror its competition.

Though I do find it amusing to watch, it’s also a little depressing to see the revolutionary site come to its end so pathetically. No one likes to see old women in miniskirts, or decrepit men attempting to dance the Soulja Boy. Mother MySpace really needs to take off the anti-aging cream of stolen features, and let the other websites continue reveling in their heyday peacefully.

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