In October 2006, 19 year old Ashley Grills, posing as a romantically-inclined boy named Josh Evans, sent 13-year-old Missourian Megan Meier a MySpace message: "the world would be a better place without you." Later that night, Meier hanged herself. Now Los Angeles police are prosecuting. Their target? Not Ashley Grills, interviewed by Good Morning America in the clip above. Prosecutors say Grills was just acting on the behest of her employers: Meier's neighbors, Curt and Lori Drew. Granted immunity, Grills will take the witness stand against them. Late last year, it looked like MySpace might face legal trouble for its role in Meiers's death, but after police in Missouri refused to press charges against the Drews, the Fox Interactive company dodged that bullet, positioning itself as a victim of the Drews' fraud. Just like Meier.

For some of the Web's more respected names, it's a really special day. They get to treat their readers and fans with the contempt they hide most of the year. Below, five pranks today that show just how much the Internet hates you. And I do mean you.

Megan Meier was a Missouri teenager who hanged herself after bullying from a neighbor girl, abetted by the neighbor's mother. Because most of the bullying took place online, on MySpace, the story has a special appeal to the newsmedia—it's not just bullying, it's cyber-bullying. Good Morning America weighed in on the tragedy in a segment this morning. An excerpt appears above. It illustrates not only the importance of being careful "what you say online," but also the dangers of speaking extemporaneously on live television. Was "hanging on your every word" really the best choice of language there? CLIP »

Yahoo, Google and MySpace plan to further compound their OpenSocial initiative with another initiative, the OpenSocial Foundation. OpenSocial is a widget platform Google first announced last fall when Facebook seemed poised to "take over the world" with its own platform. After the announcement, Google rushed OpenSocial into development and completed — sort of — a beta version earlier this year. The foundation proposal calls for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status and protection against patent challenges. Ah, so this is really about getting donors to pay Google's legal bills!

Breaking: Young people are more used to being filmed than earlier generations! And in fact they feel obligated to share their stories on video, so much so that they've "blurred the lines between reality and 'reality,'" according to Newsweek's new trend piece. The changes come because everyone has a camera now, as well as blogs and MySpaces to turn temporary emotions into permanent records. Good news for reality show producers, great news for Media Studies majors, but fantastic news for young people destined to become famous (and we all are totes gonna be famous, dude).

Looking after his investment in online gamemaker Zynga, VC blogger Fred Wilson reports that applications on MySpace's platform "are not taking off in quite the same velocity that Facebook apps did." He blames MySpace's lack of "viral channels" — code for spamming tools.

ComScore reports MySpace hit 109.3 million worldwide unique visitors in January. Facebook had 100.7 million, only 8 percent less. Last year, MySpace's lead was four times as large. [SAI]

Mallory Simon works for "the most trusted name in news." But she's working hard to make CNN also the most trusted name in news feeds. Simon gives CNN.com readers every detail of when and how Eliot Spitzer's call girl, Ashley Alexandra Dupré, changed her MySpace and Facebook profiles last week. But at 1,000-plus words, Simon overstays her welcome. Instead of paying writers by the word, why don't we pay them to leave? The 100-word version, below.

"Mysterious" the Queens rapper who starred in a music video with Ashley Alexandra Dupré, recently appeared on the Today Show and Access Hollywood to "defend" his friend. "Mysterious" told the Today Show gang that he and Ashley are "tight like a family," but Myspace messages sent from "Mysterious" to Dupré last night indicate that Eliot Spitzer's favorite high priced hooker didn't ask him to hit the talk show circuit on her behalf. In fact, it sounds like she might be pretty pissed off about the whole thing. In the message "Mysterious" indicates that he hasn't heard from Ashley in a while despite repeated attempts to get in touch. He also tells Ashley: "i hope you feel we helped you more then hurt you in speaking out." Wow, apparently sometimes media whores do feel dirty afterwards.

ComScore tells us Google is trouncing its competitors in the online-video market. In January 2008, one in three online videos viewed in the U.S. were watched on YouTube — totaling 3.4 billion videos. The next closest competitor, Fox Interactive — mostly MySpace — had a mere 6 percent share, with just under 600 million videos watched.

Even more astounding are the average minutes per viewer. A typical YouTube visitor spent almost two hours a month on the site, watching 41.4 videos each. Now if only Google could find a way to make money off all of those screen-glued eyeballs. Until then, we won't know if YouTube at $1.65 billion was really a steal.

Eliot Spitzer's alleged call-girl — Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a.k.a "Kristen" — can sing. Whether she should? Less clear. Here's the single from her MySpace page, "What We Want."

Click to viewMeet Ashley Alexandra Dupré, the prostitute known as "Kristen" New York governor Eliot Spitzer reportedly visited as Client 9. She's an aspiring R&B singer from Long Island, the New York Times reports. Her MySpace page and photos, below.

The New York Times was the first to track down "Kristen", the high-class prostitute whose two hours with former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer ended his career. Her real name: Ashley Youmans, aka Ashley Alexandra Dupre. She's 22, she's from Jersey, and she's newly single. Her MySpace profile is still live, if you'd like to listen to her demo. Or check out her top five! The kind-of insane Times story pretty clearly just went live because they knew their scoop wouldn't last. It summarizes her MySpace bio, quotes her talking about how she saw the Rolling Stones, and criticizes her demo song's "dated slang." And that's about it for news. But still, good show! Ashley's blog entry from Thursday, August 30 is full of awesome advice, so we will reprint it, below.

Apparently, the difference between a $3,000 hooker and a $50 hooker is the ruined aspirations. "Kristen's" Myspace page, as uncovered by NYT. She's got a decent voice, $50 bucks says Perez Hilton signs her to his new label deal before summer.

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg launched an iPhone-friendly version of its website last August, MySpace's Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe have been scrambling to catch up. The two have put a small team, likely under Jason Ling, MySpace's head of mobile development, on a MySpace app for the iPhone. Electronista thinks the rumored app is being worked on by part-timers. Our sources say it's a larger project, with the codename Operation IFMD. Anyone know what that stands for, other than "I'm F—-ing Matt Damon"? And while we're at it, screenshots?

We hear that all MySpace talks at next last week's Mix Conference were unexpectedly cancelled. Anyone know anything about it? email us.

And she's telling her MySpace friends all about it! From the singer and Elvis daughter's latest post, titled "confirmation under the gun," she rails against "the media" for wildly speculating about her expanding belly and forcing her to confirm her pregnancy before she was ready: "They couldn't wait to find out if my weight gain was because I was just overeating, in which case It would be open season and they can do the old 'following in her fathers sad and unfortunate demise' story again. Or, less interesting for them, and probably much to their dismay, I could just be pregnant and therefore have a legitimate reason for weight gain at which point they should probably wipe the saliva off of their fangs and put them back in their mouths or they may expose the black little souls that they are." Tell us more, girl!

Jimmy Wales should quit Wikipedia — but please, not the rest of the Internet. He's far too entertaining.On Jimmy Wales's MySpace page, he lists himself as "married" and a "proud parent" who's "looking to meet Wikipedian MySpacers." His friends list tells another story. The most recent comment comes from a MySpace user named Andrea, whose picture closely resembles Andrea Weckerle, a woman to whom Wales has been linked. Scroll through Wales's friends list, and you'll find a woman in a French maid's outfit, a woman in a thong bikini, a woman posing in lingerie, and several girls who seem a bit young for Wales. One almost needs an online encyclopedia to keep track of them all.

Now we know why Bebo's so eager for more cash. It needs more servers. According to Pingdom, Bebo has already been down for 12 hours and 28 minutes so far this year. Check out the full chart to see how 13 other social networks have fared so far.

The best thing about Facebook is that it isn't a blinking mass of glittery images and horrendous, unreadable "designs," right? Perhaps not for long. Now application developers can use Adobe's Flash in their work. This will be nice for musicians who want to embed their music or whatever, but how long until auto-play emo starts blasting from my speakers while I'm trying to stalk catch up with old acquaintances? Please, Mark Zuckerberg, I beg of you: Keep these people in line. God forbid Facebook ever become as ugly — or as popular — as MySpace.