Yesterday's article about Megan Meier, the Missourian 13-year-old who was cyberbullied by a crazed neighborhood mom until she hanged herself with a belt last year, made us think twice, again, about this whole 'internet' thing. 12-year-olds are saying things like, "Once you're on MySpace, you're trapped. You spend all your time online just trying to keep the negative stuff about you from spreading." And: "It's like I can't even do anything because everybody is sitting there with a cellphone just waiting for me to mess up." Seriously, guys, it is nice being able to look up movie times and look at LOLcats, but in general the whole thing should be shut down. [NYT]

MySpace is settling into its new San Francisco office space on Second Street near South Park, from the looks of this photo sent by a helpful inside spy. The building was a former startup incubator owned by LookSmart. No computer setups, yet, but note the size of the coffee machine. This should keep coders awake long enough to fix the social network's screamingly bad user interface. More pictures of the office follow.

Connected Ventures cofounder Zach Klein did fly out to California to interview for a gig at MySpace, but it wasn't the right fit for him. Or he wasn't the right fit for MySpace. Hard to tell which. So what's the designer behind BustedTees and Vimeo up to next? Think geckos and real estate.

Just in case the rest of the world isn't paying attention to the Valley's throbbing hard-on for Facebook, Merriam-Webster has stacked the deck in favor of facebook for Word of the Year. Last year the honor went to Stephen Colbert's truthiness. While not as catchy, timely, or funny as truthiness, there is less doubt about facebook's value as Word of the Year than Facebook's valuation of $15 billion.

Coined by R. Stevens in his webcomic Diesel Sweeties, "social nerdwanking" means lording your social-network superiority over others, which is secretly the only reason you bother with Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Orkut, and every other social network. Except your legitimate if fruitless use of Adult FriendFinder.

Remember OpenSocial, Google's open-source platform for building applications that let users throw sheep at each other on any social network, not just Facebook? "At this point it looks like we'll make a couple more revisions to the API before it's baked enough for launch," Googler Arne Roomann-Kurrik tells partners in a Google Group dedicated to OpenSocial. "This puts us into January before the API is ready. Expect some early adopters to have a public launch early 2008." In the meantime, Google's vaunted partners are all off launching developer platforms on their own.

You might be surprised to learn that MySpace is bigger than Google. This, according to Barbara Walters, or at least the notes MySpace PR flack Dani Dudeck handed her before she interviewed Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson. Don't miss the tough questions like, "If I were a Martian. I come down from outer space. I hear about something called My Space. What is it?"

Of course Tequila's been a hit on MySpace for quite some time now; she says she accepts 10,000 to 20,000 friend requests a day. I'm not sure who Facebook's most popular member is — Scoble? I know you just can't wait for the first episode of A Shot At Love With Robert Scoble.

As we previously reported, with its upcoming redesigns MySpace intends to match Facebook feature by feature. The process begins Thursday, when MySpace will roll out its version of the Facebook News Feed, according to reports. The Facebook news feed — for those of you not familiar with current events of the past 100 years — is the constantly updated information stream which tells users what their friends are up to on the site and on the Web. Since It's the first thing users see when they log on, the news feed has become an important place for Facebook to serve advertisements. MySpace's copycat will be, too. Here's what it will look like, according to TechCrunch.

MySpace has strong ties to musicians, with bands favoring the social network to host fan sites. But the News Corp. subsidiary has yet to figure out a way to profit off their music. The independent music store idea flamed out as partner Snocap laid off 60 percent of its employees in early October. So what's MySpace going to try next? Giving music away free, supported by ads, Adweek reports.

A year ago, the 13-year-old Megan Meier began an online relationship with another MySpace user named Josh Evans. According to reports, the relationship began with flirtation, but ended in tragedy. Evans's last message to Meier read, "The world would be a better place without you." Shortly after reading it, Megan Meier ended her own life. You could call Josh Evans a cyberbully, except that Josh Evans wasn't real. He was a creation of Meier's neighbors, Curt and Lori Drew.

Why does Facebook seem to have more momentum now than MySpace? Some might tell you it's Facebook's vastly superior user interface. Oh, and that the site actually works most of the time. While they might not say so in public, MySpace executives agree. The News Corp.-owned social network is hiring for a redesign and it's being very upfront with candidates as to what it wants: a feature by feature Facebook match. Innovation be damned, News Corp. wants to catch the perceived leader. The same source also tells me News Corp. already knows who it wants for the job.

VC blogger Fred Wilson gives Google and Yahoo too much credit: He's taking their "Inbox 2.0" initiatives to turn Gmail and Yahoo Mail into social networks seriously. He 's put together a chart comparing the "social graphs" — we think he means "number of users" — of some popular social networks versus Microsoft's Hotmail and AIM.com. Wilson estimates that Yahoo and Google, which aren't actually on the chart, have about 250 million and 60 million users. Here's the chart.

Speaking at a conference over the weekend, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe reportedly asked Facebook to join Google's OpenSocial initiative. Facebook COO Owen Van Natta politely rejected the idea. He said Facebook's developer platform protects user privacy better than the open standard.

Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. unit which includes MySpace, IGN, and Photobucket, is planning to launch an online-ad network. Besides FIM websites, prospective customers include other News Corp. properties like the New York Post, and, possibly, the Wall Street Journal. [Silicon Alley Insider]

LookSmart, a San Francisco-based online-ad company, signed a long-term deal on a South of Market office building in its 1999 dotcom heyday. Since then, it has struggled to fill the brick fortress located at 2nd and Brannan. The first answer was to set up the empty space into a startup incubator, attracting tenants with bubbly names like Mashery, Twistage, and LicketyShip. But it appears those startups are about to lose their space. As rumored, the San Francisco office of MySpace will be heading into the building, and LookSmart is using the chance to shuffle the startups out. A tipster tells us:

Each fall, Time magazine hosts a panel luncheon to put forward nominations for their annual super-special "Person of the Year" issue. The magazine feeds a couple hundred media folks and then pretends to let them participate in the decision—they also hand out gift bags, which was a good enough reason for us to go today! This year's panelists: Brian Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, George Allen, MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe and rockstar activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Last year's much-ridiculed mylar heraldee—you! I mean, me!—requires a decent recovery for 2007. This is why it was so lame that Williams, Whoopi and DeWolfe all suggested some take on the environment. Whoopi even went all abstract on us, choosing just the word green. Too much Joy Behar exposure, perhaps?

"The two platforms are very different in the user experience ... MySpace pages become a home on the Internet, it's where they discover people, content and culture ... Facebook, on the other hand, tends to be a Web utility, similar to a phone." — News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch on the differences between his MySpace and competitor Facebook. [Sydney Morning Herald]

Ad executives spent Tuesday evening telling me that Facebook's advertising innovations have "blown MySpace out of the water," to quote one source. But you won't catch News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch acting like he's been left high and dry, at least not publicly. Reporting News Corp.'s third-quarter earnings yesterday, Murdoch said "any fear [about MySpace] is misplaced." Why? According to reports, Murdoch told analysts Facebook isn't a social network like MySpace, it's a utility. "Like a phonebook."

Let's come out and say it: Facebook wants to be MySpace. And MySpace wants to be Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's social network has the buzz, the tech, and the runaway growth rate, while MySpace has more users, more revenues, and the backing of News Corp. But the mutual envy became really clear to me when Facebook announced its new advertising plan, which lets corporations place spam unsolicited commercial messages in users' news feeds. Why, that's been the basis of MySpace since 2002. MySpace is a spam operation that became a social network. And now Facebook is a social network that's turning into a spam operation.