Rumors are swirling that MySpace will announce a platform for application developers, like Facebook's next week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. But they're wrong, according to a source close to the company. There is a platform in the works, but it's not ready yet — delayed, like so many other MySpace tech projects. Instead, MySpace's Chris DeWolfe and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch will be in town to make some announcement related to MySpace's instant-messaging client — ho-hum news — and, more interestingly, to open up a San Francisco office. Why the need to expand from MySpace's Beverly Hills digs?

Apparently, overseas, there are social networks other than Facebook and MySpace. Who knew? Read/WriteWeb mentions that social net Hi5 which tallies 35 million uniques per month according to ComScore, making it competitive with Facebook. And yet the name will draw blank stares at a Silicon Valley tech meetup. Like Google's Orkut, Hi5 is huge overseas and virtually nonexistent in the U.S. Hi5 even launched a developer API in August, but got scant coverage from the Web 2.0 crowd. The bias, of course, is partly driven by economics. Tapping overseas advertisers is tough, and so developers planning to build ad-supported websites and applications naturally turn to U.S. markets. But media myopia is a factor, too. Until magazine editors' teenage daughters start using it, Hi5 is likely to remain invisible.

Felix Salmon of Portfolio thinks online auction-house eBay should sell Internet telephony service Skype to News Corp. for use in its social network, MySpace. Salmon thinks that a free calling service fits more naturally with MySpace, which is, after all, about communication. While that may be true, eBay will likely have to accept a much lower price than what they originally paid. Even Skype cofounder Niklas Zennstrom is conceding that Skype was overvalued from the beginning. If even a founder is doubtful of Skype's value, though, why should eBay strike a private deal to sell the unit? We say let the marketplace rule. eBay should list Skype on, well, eBay, and auction it off. Just imagine how much profit it will make from the listing fees.

On Friday we wrote about Facebook launching a possible iTunes competitor. We've now found a new, more compelling rumor from Rafat Ali of PaidContent. Instead of a music store, Facebook is said to be launching an artist platform to compete with MySpace's musician-friendly profile pages — a feature that has been a huge part of the social network's growth. Ali says that the platform includes iTunes integration for buying music through Apple's store, special profiles for bands, and unique widgets for music promotion, tour dates, and more, all within the clean Facebook interface.

As rumors grow that social network Facebook will introduce its own payment system, News Corp.-owned MySpace, still the leading social network, is teaming up with PayPal, eBay's online payments division. The partnership amounts to an experiment at this point, focusing on donations to political campaigns and nonprofits — not exactly a hotbed of MySpace activity. Wake us when you can buy concert tickets on MySpace. But the move does speak to the partners' fears that Facebook will introduce its own payment system. How to respond? Become frenemies, of course. MySpace instantly has a proven payment system without months or years of development, and PayPal gains access to MySpace's millions of users. Nothing builds partnerships faster than fear of the competition.

The more popular this social networking thing gets, the more exclusive the communities become. For an evil example, there's the site Newsaxon.org, a MySpace for racists which bills itself as "an online community for whites by whites." Though we suspect that the clientele of this network is a little less powerful than the mega-moguls on Facebook — five of the twenty available job descriptions are "Looking for Work," "Laid Off", "Unemployed," "Billionare" [sic], and "Millionare" [sic]. What, no "Entrepreneur in Action"?

Chris Crocker, MySpace and YouTube star and teen LOLgay, is now the awareness spokesperson for not putting naked pictures of yourself online. A week or so ago, an extremely gay blog posted extremely naked pictures of Crocker that they said they found on the "Suicide Boys Livejournal Community or on a dating site." (We didn't link to them because he was like, 17 or something when he took the pictures.) Now the young web sensation has found meaning in a quest: helping other home-schooled teens to not put the butt-nekkid jpegs on the internets. It's a great and timely public service campaign for our time. He's also working on his zen practice: Crocker told Seattle-based reporter Eli Sanders of folks on the internet that "If they want to stare at a 17-year-old cock all day, that's their damage." Good point! But was the internet designed for doing anything else?

Facebook might be stronger in a handful of countries than MySpace, but not strong enough for their liking. The company is in the process of translating their entire site into a number of non-English languages. How do you say "poke" in Arabic? [Financial Times]

Fox Interactive Media missed its internal revenue targets for July and August. So, unless they have an extraordinary September, FIM will miss for the quarter. Perhaps the Google/Myspace ad deal isn't working out as well as Tom had hoped. [Silicon Alley Insider]

As the hung Phil Spector jury, sufficiently confused by the judge's introduction and subsequent retraction of instructions, retires again to the jury room to resume deliberations (this time armed with 12 foam marital-therapy bats), a mini-controversy has erupted:

Facebook has overtaken MySpace in the United Kingdom, a media stronghold for the latter's parent company, News Corp. As one might write on Rupert Murdoch's Facebook wall, OMG embarrassing!!! [Mashable]

Many parents are worried about their teenage children obsessively spending all their time on MySpace and other social networks. Not Ashley Qualls's mother — even though her 17-year-old daughter has gotten so involved with MySpace she dropped out of high school. Qualls has parlayed her MySpace designs into an ad-supported business worth millions of dollars. Her website, Whateverlife.com, has seven million unique visitors a month. The teenager has bought her family a new home and hired her mom.

Facebook isn't the only social network over whom people are scrapping for credit as founders. Brad Greenspan, the former CEO of MySpace parent Intermix Media, disputes Brett Brewer's claim to having founded MySpace. What's more amazing is that the founder-status mention appeared offhandedly in a TechCrunch company profile — but Greenspan nonetheless found it, and left a comment. One wonders — does Greenspan have Google News set to email him an alert whenever someone uses the words "MySpace" and "founder"? At any rate, Valleywag's reinvention of the old saying remains true: success has many founders.

There's nothing quite like having your online profile mined for fun and profit. MySpace has revealed details of its new targeted advertising ploy to the New York Times. Not only does the system troll for overt clues like occupation, but it also analyzes the kind of music you listen to, the movies you watch, and who you'd most like to meet. From this data it can determine whether you're into indie rap, zombie movies, or have a thing for Samuel Jackson — and pelt you with advertisements accordingly. The system can even be used to target regional fan of a particular music genre for concert tours. "We are blessed with a phenomenal amount of information about the likes, dislikes and life's passions of our users," says Fox Interactive Media president Peter Levinsohn. Blessed. Thank goodness the Web's denizens are so free with their personal information — it's considered "digital gold." These targeted ads are projected tol boost MySpace's monthly revenue by $30 million. Maybe it will finally have enough free cash to fix the damn site.

Need help getting your head right? Hood psychologist Tionna Smalls is here to answer your questions. Ask Tionna! This week: a two-fer!

"Will Sumner Redstone ever get over being bested by Rupert Murdoch in the bidding for MySpace two years ago? Maybe. Fortune has learned of two stealth projects that Redstone's company, Viacom, has in the works for its MTV Networks unit. One is a twist on social networking called Flux, the other involves an investment in upcoming online video site VBS.tv, and both suggest that Redstone's company may actually be on to something." [Fortune]

MySpace is taking a new tack with video in an effort to lure away YouTube viewers — it's developing a catalog of professionally produced videos. The social network has announced it will distribute Web production quarterlife, a series about show biz wannabes, developed by the producers of Blood Diamond. The real surprise is that each episode will cost more than $500,000 — roughly 100 times what Michael Eisner's Vuguru spent on each episode of Prom Queen. MySpace's is praying that original, professional quality content will be enough of lure to sell mad ads against. But the kind of cash thrown at this project could have been much better spent, by say finally fixing the perpetually broken site.

New friends acquired through MySpace or Facebook may as well be invisible. England's Sheffield Hallam University, studying whether social networks ease the friend-making process, has concluded that "online only" relationships are extremely shallow. It determined that 90 percent of close online connections met in real life. Well, duh. Most use networks to keep in touch with people they already know, or, perhaps, reach out to friends of friends. Who actively cultivates all those unsolicited Facebook friend requests from total strangers? (Photo by ellectric)

"Here's Your Chance to Poke Martha Stewart." Expanding beyond her MySpace presence with a new Facebook profile, the home-style guru puts the "omni" in omnimedia — even if she is a little slow to join the bandwagon. [AdAge]

"While [Facebook apps] may seem silly now," writes San Jose Mercury News reporter Dean Takahashi, "those applications could eventually become some of the most popular services on Facebook, and MySpace may have to follow." Takahashi explores the differences between the big three networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace) and fails to determine which is best. [San Jose Mercury News]