There needs to be a term for when the shining tech star of the previous generation of the internet burns out then sells for less than the world's most expensive dollhouse. MySpacing out? New York tech incubator Betaworks has bought the skeleton of Digg, once a social networking monster—it even got verbed!—for a paltry $500,000, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The key takeway from Digg's collapse, as with MySpace: The internet used to be really bad, but now it's awesome and nothing like this will happen to any popular social websites ever again.

[Image of Digg founder Kevin Rose on the cover of Business Week in happier times]