Despite rumors to the contrary, News Corp. president Peter Chernin says there are no talks and no deal. His boss, Rupert Murdoch, was reportedly thinking about trading MySpace for a 25 percent stake in Yahoo.

Facebook still has a long way to go before overtaking MySpace as the number one social network, but the popular Facebook music application, iLike, has rapidly gained ground on MySpace with music fans. [VentureBeat]

MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe may not be your friend (that's the other co-founder, Tom Anderson), but he does hold a few powerful people near-and-dear. Including, Portfolio reports, Wendi Deng, the wife of News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch. Portfolio surmises that DeWolfe's friendship with Deng might help convince her husband to meet DeWolfe and Anderson's $50M compensation demand to stick around for another year. We think that DeWolfe has the wrong target in mind. While it might be easier for him to spend time with Deng — they're both on the board of MySpace China — we think he should be buttering up News Corp heir apparent Peter Chernin, who recent fillings revealed to be the highest paid person at News Corp.

Hi, I am a young person who goes to major web sites! I am "in the know" about technology so I have several good ideas for these sites, and I will list them here. ATTENTION PEOPLE WHO WORK FOR THESE SITES: If you read my idea and you use it, you have to pay me for it with 1% of your company. My first idea will finally make Yahoo a popular web site.

How to lure back social-network users lost to the shiny, pimply new face at school? MySpace could, we suppose, give its user interface a good scrubbing. But no, instead, the aging, News Corp.-owned website is trying to prove it's still hip by hitting the road. MySpace is hosting the eponymous MySpace Music Tour, on which headliners include Hellogoodbye and Say Anything, who both credit (or blame) MySpace for their popularity, and Polysics, which is on MySpace's in-house music label. With sites like YouTube and Facebook crowding in on MySpace , the social network is performing all sorts of stunts to prove it's still a hot property. Anything, that is, but fixing its actual product.

It's either News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch's worst nightmare — or his wet dream. Two recent college graduates, Jess Martin and Drew Chen, have launched, as we predicted, SpaceLift, an application on Facebook that takes a chaotic, ugly MySpace profile page and displays it in Facebook's spare, blue-and-white layout. For Murdoch, who's voiced admiration for Facebook, even though News Corp. owns social-networking rival MySpace, this could be disastrous.

Recent University of North Carolina graduates Jess Martin and Drew Chen are launching a new Facebook application, SpaceLift, tomorrow. Martin and Chen write in an email: "See MySpace as you have never seen her before on Wednesday, August 29th. MySpace is about to undergo plastic surgery." Like many technically adept college grads, Martin is disdainful of MySpace, but he recognizes that it remains more popular than Facebook. On his blog, Martin posts that he's writing a Facebook app — presumably SpaceLift — to pull data from MySpace and "bridge the gap" between the two sites. Given the complaints that Facebook is turning to MySpace, Martin and Chen may well find that more people would rather burn that bridge than cross it.

Readers, you amaze us. And fascinate us. And very occasionally, disappoint us. Our corporate overlords, who are all afroth about search engine optimization these days, sent us a list of the top search terms people use to find posts on Valleywag. Photobucket, whose sale to MySpace we broke exclusively, ranks highly, as does Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Fake Steve Jobs. But "webcam sex"? "Lick it"? "Hot Asians"? Really, people. Behave yourselves. The full list, after the jump.

Broadcast network NBC has inked promotional deals with almost every major Internet player to distribute the pilot episodes for its new fall lineup. Almost, that is, because it appears to be shunning Google's YouTube online-video site, as well as the News Corp.-owned MySpace. According to The Hollywood Reporter, episodes of new shows "Chuck," "Life," and "Journeyman" will be available for download on Amazon beginning September 10. If you'd prefer to download using Apple's iTunes software, sign up for the Apple Students group on social network Facebook. Members of that group get a one-week headstart on downloading the pilots. Prefer to stream your entertainment? Beginning in mid-September, you can catch "Life" on AOL, "Journeyman" on MSN, and "Chuck" on Yahoo. But it's the omissions that are really interesting.

News Corp. may allow users to sell goods and advertise their websites on MySpace, reports The Los Angeles Times. It explains that users have already found ways to work around the current ban on peddling wares, so MySpace might as well find a way to make money off any resulting commerce. [The Los Angeles Times]

Michael Eisner, the former Disney CEO, is turning into a Web 2.0 demigod, claims BusinessWeek. Except it fails to prove any kind of new-media apotheosis whatsoever. Beyond a few cursory details about Eisner's portfolio of invesments — kid-friendly, just like Disney! — the majority of the piece details his interest in a potential acquisition of Topps, the trading-cards company. Somehow, in the perfervid imaginations of BusinessWeek editors, the right to print Star Wars and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trading cards and stickers transforms into "fodder for online shows." But never mind that.

PlayboyU is stealing a page from Facebook — Facebook circa 2004, that is — and launching a college-only social network, restricted to people with ".edu" addresses. With help from Ning, it's starting PlayboyU — but not, sadly enough, delivering the goods in the form of nude coed shots. No matter. The college-only restriction limits the potential audience. And why would college kids, when Facebook and MySpace exist, bother to sign up for this website? The association with a porn brand alone should be enough to scare most students off. One thing Playboy forgot: ".edu" addresses include professors and alumni, who might take an interest in students' extracurricular activities on the site. We're placing the site on immediate deathwatch.

Some observers think that Fotolog's rumored sale price, at north of $100 million, is too rich. After all, the photo-sharing site has a mere 10 million users, putting the price on each user's head at $10 and up, while Photobucket, with 40 million users, reportedly sold to MySpace for an amount in the range of $250 million to $300 million, valuing its users at $6-$7.50 apiece. But that facile analysis ignores two important factors — factors which tell us much about the changing market for Web companies.

MySpace, the News Corp.-owned social network for the unwashed masses, heroically sued spammer Sanford Wallace to stop him from abusing the site. Wallace allegedly created 11,000 fake profiles and spoofed MySpace login pages to gain access to legitimate users' accounts. MySpace also claims that he used an automated program to control the fake and hijacked profiles to send out links to adult-oriented websites in comments and messages, bringing him enough traffic to collect about $1 million in revenue from his websites. A federal court injunction prohibits Wallace from having a MySpace profile or sending emails implying that he is affiliated with the Fox Interactive Media property. Pity, that. For a while, Wallace made it look like exploiting emo teenagers with unfortunate hair was an even easier way to riches than writing a Facebook app.

A source close to the company tells Valleywag that Fotolog, the social network and photo-sharing site, has been sold to a large Latin American company for an amount over $100 million. Fotolog CEO John Borthwick, who's on his way to Italy for a family vacation, hasn't returned a request for comment. Update: "As if," emails Fotolog cofounder Scott Heiferman. Still, the rumored sale, if true, makes eminent sense for Fotolog — and for Borthwick. Fotolog, though based in New York City, never took off in its home market. But overseas, especially in Latin America, it's huge. The site, which asks users to post a single photo every day, now counts more than 10 million members. While clearly successful, Fotolog is just one of many ventures for Borthwick, a former executive at AOL and Time Warner — and a sale would free him up to pursue those.

Last night, at Little Giant on the Lower East Side, two earlythirtysomethings were on a date. He was wearing a black t-shirt, his skin was an unhealthily alabaster and the baby fat of his youth had given way to the slight pudginess of middle-age. He worked for Apple or maybe Gucci. It was unclear. She was cute and worked designing software for PDAs. He was talking expertly about earlytwentysomethings.

What do you do if you are the granddaddy of social networks, having been around for more than a decade, but you aren't getting any bounce from the social-network buzz? Shoot for the moon, of course! Classmates.com, acquired by discount Internet service provider United Online for $100 million in 2004, is being spun off in hopes of raising $125 million in an IPO. With the Valley in thrall to social networks, the IPO market heating up, and Facebook's mythical valuation going ever higher, it's the perfect time for United Online to capitalize on the purchase. But what goes up can also go down. Here's how the IPO play could backfire.

"Breaking my foot off in a prosecutor's ass ... and improving my ability to break my foot off in a prosecutor's ass." — listed among North Las Vegas Court substitute judge Jonathan MacArthur's MySpace interests. He has since been removed from the court's rotation, proving you can never be too careful when posting your personal profile on the Internet. [Techdirt]

You'd think Mark Zuckerberg would be thrilled to make the cover of Newsweek. But secretly, we bet, the CEO and founder of Facebook is fuming. Why? Because the venerable weekly made a newbie mistake on the cover, one that Facebookers find grating. The cover invites readers to "add" Mark as a friend. Yes, the site does have an "Add Friend" dialog, so it's technically correct — but insiders hate the "add" usage, since it's easily confused with MySpace's lingo. Mark's own sister, Randi Jayne, chewed me out a couple weeks ago for that very mistake. And anyone who's used the site — clearly, not Newsweek's editors — knows that the proper terminology is to "request" or "confirm" someone as a friend. The basic gaffe tells us that the rest of the story — a predictable rehash by writer Steven Levy, assisted by eight (eight!) colleagues — can mostly be dismissed with the "Ignore" button. A few interesting status updates, after the jump:

Kara Swisher says a MySpace acquisition is off the table, but Yahoo is considering all kinds of other options — including partnering with Google to make more money off its search ads. [AllThingsD]