Both MySpace and Facebook lost five percent of their traffic from December to January. Nielsen Online says Facebook lost 400,000 U.K. site visitors after 17 straight months of growth. "Most of the leading social networks are less popular in the U.K. than they were a year ago. It was inevitable that early growth rates couldn't be sustained and the larger networks have been plateauing over the last few months." (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

The four major labels are now talking to News Corp. about its plans to launch a MySpace music service which would make music available via free digital streams, MP3 downloads and through subscription plans. What I want to know: How much do I pay to stop MySpace from playing music every time I land on a page? [Sydney Morning Herald]

Parodying a high school principal? Weak but understandable. Making a MySpace profile for him which reads "I like to give anal to the little boys at my school"? Less defensible and possibly libelous! But after a thirteen-year-old boy was expelled from school for making the profile (which also lists Hitler, Michael Jackson and a purple strap-on as the principal's heroes), his parents are suing the school for violating the boy's free speech rights, since he made the joke on his own computer and because it's so clearly not a serious accusation of child rape. Below is the now-deleted profile, or at least the terribly grubby copy used in the court filing. If anyone has a better screencap, send it to tips@gawker.com.

Courtney Love is the same as the rest of us. Much like you and I (or maybe just me), the addled and insane singer/songwriter (and better singer/songwriter marry-er) sometimes gets trashed and goes on the internet and writes embarrassing things. Her medium of choice seems to be her MySpace blog (Why must celebrities have blogs?) Last week she posted an angry rant directed at a person who had published Courtney's friend's phone number, saying it was the rock star's. Now the friend is getting tons of calls and Courtney is just fed fucking up with it. The most wonderfully inscrutable and bloggy detail I could glean from it is that she doesn't actually do anything for the site, but still loves MySpace very much: "..it takes about 8 people to run this site for some reason and tho i do read the comments i dontrtend to write lengthy letters back personally although occasionally i wrote a friend or somneone i like or post at someones space b ut not too often, trhats just how these my spaces work- so dont go offended - i love this my space and i dont need this karma wierdness- get off my cloud." Everyone's always on my damn cloud, too, Courtney. [ohnotheydidn't] Full text fter the jump, plus the wonderful, classic video of Courtney Love harassing Kurt Loder and Madonna at the VMAs.

Wily old Rupert Murdoch. His media conglomerate, News Corporation, is in talks to merge its social network site, MySpace, with Yahoo, reports the Wall Street Journal. Why is this so clever?

The number of people visiting social networks continues to rise, but the rate at which these visitors return to sites like MySpace and Facebook is on the decline. According to ComScore, the average visits per visitor to MySpace are down 11.6 percent year-over-year. To Facebook they're down 12.3 percent. To social networks in general, they're down 1.8 percent. The numbers suggest social networks aren't as crucial to their users' lives anymore. And they've never been critical to advertisers. As few as 4 in 10,000 people who see ads on social networking sites click on them. As good a time as any for Rupert Murdoch to dump MySpace in Jerry Yang's lap.

Rupert Murdoch loves to make trouble for other moguls. Could he stop Microsoft's bid for Yahoo? Wall Street analysts have been asking Murdoch if he would buy Yahoo outright. Never mind that the News Corp. chief doesn't have the cash to outbid Microsoft. Such a straightforward deal would be far too boring for Murdoch to contemplate. Instead, here's a scenario bruited about by Silicon Alley Insider.

Facebooker Dave Morin, in this photo snapped at MySpace's San Francisco launch party last week, seems to be gazing longingly at Rupert Murdoch's rival social network. Could he be switching teams? "He seemed to be very friendly with a number of MySpace execs at their god-awful party last week," reports a tipster. "He turned up late and then they all seemed to leave
together to go off somewhere." It might be time for Morin, Facebook's senior platform manager, to make a move. Some developers respect his enthusiasm for Facebook's platform, but one told me, "He's in over his head."

Tom is getting older every year — and that's not even counting his little fib about his age. So News Corp. has found a new 20something — this time, a real one — to serve as MySpace's face: COO Amit Kapur, the guy MySpace hired to execute its plan to mimic Facebook. Elevated from the ranks, Kapur oversees business development, business operations, platform development, mobile, finance, HR and customer support. Which sounds impressive until interviewer Kara Swisher dismisses him with a deadpan, "Wow, you're the big guy."

Google missed Wall Street's expectations last quarter and during a conference call with analysts, CEO Eric Schmidt and the gang blamed ad partner MySpace. This news shocked, simply shocked, MySpace cofounder Chris DeWolfe, he tells interviewer Kara Swisher in this clip. He has "no idea" what all that was about, he says. Then — uh oh, it's slippery! — DeWolfe starts to backslide.

The rumor mill is always churning on San Francisco-based Bebo. Now Google may be interested in acquiring the social network for $1 billion to $1.5 billion. That's a lot of cheese for a smallish social network that has almost no presence in the U.S. Why would Google want it?

MySpace's developer platform bills itself as "a place for developers." Its launch party, however, was nothing of the sort. Brian Solis's photos from the event showed bloggers, reporters, and executives galore. Meanwhile, actual programmers, we hear, were left waiting outside on 2nd Street. If there was a single real developer at the party, they somehow escaped Solis's omnivorous lens. [Bub.blicio.us]

The Church of Scientology is a famously vindictive institution, prepared to use litigation and harassment to suppress critics. And nobody gets kid-glove treatment, not even relatives of the sect's high priest, David Miscavige. His niece, Jenna Hill, claims she's been subjected to harassment since speaking out in support of Andrew Morton's critical biography of Tom Cruise, the Hollywood star and fervent Scientologist. The dreadful price: "At least eight friends have removed themselves from my MySpace page."

We don't consider MySpace's new widget specs a platform. And we don't think the people who hack together interactive MySpace page decorations qualify as developers. But we agree on this much: MySpace knows how to throw a party. The MySpace Developer Platform launch is at 625 2nd Street, at 6:30 p.m. Other sites are giving away exclusive invites, but we're just issuing a license to crash. Tell them Valleywag sent you, and give Tom our love.

MySpace has launched a so-called "developer platform," allowing glorified Web designers to write widgets slightly more sophisticated than a photo slideshow for the News Corp.-owned website. I asked Ted Dziuba of the late, lamented Uncov what he thought. Here's what he said:

It might as well be 2006 for all the cash social networks aren't raking in. During its recent earnings call, Google complained that ads on social sites like MySpace and YouTube weren't meeting expectations. The WSJ reports Microsoft is losing money on its Facebook deal. Meanwhile, analytics firm eMarkerter expects ad spending on social networks to increase 70 percent in 2008, but that's an increase to only $1.56 billion. So who's to blame? One Google exec says it's those old-fashioned ad agencies.

So much for the death of television. 97.5 million people, a Super Bowl record, watched my beloved New England Patriots lose to the New York Giants, according to Fox. 107.5 million people watched the last half-hour of the game, besting the 106 million that watched the final episode of M.A.S.H. Television advertisers, who paid $2.7 million for each 30-second spot, definitely got their money's worth. Altogether, they spent $156 million on the five-hour game. It takes Google three days to make that much money.

VC blogger Fred Wilson argues that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger will be bad for users and for the Internet as a whole. "If you think about the Internet, it's a huge distributed network of loosely connected services owned and operated by literally millions. We don't need or want consolidation of services on the Internet," Wilson writes. But you know who the Microsoft-Yahoo deal is even worse news for? The incompetent executives who landed Yahoo in this pickle in the first place. They're ferociously spinning gullible reporters with rescue fantasies. Here are the five most widespread rumors — and why they're unlikely to happen.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey denied benefits to two minors because they have eating disorders. Eating disorders, the insurance company claims, are emotional, not biological. It gets more fun: Horizon has demanded access to the kids MySpace and Facebook accounds, to "shed light on the causes of the disorders, which determines the insurer's responsibility for payment." So think twice before you make your Facebook status something lame and emo: it could be used as evidence that you're uninsurable. If you can even afford it! [Law.com]

MySpace only added 8 million users in the last year and in the U.S., the social network has actually lost users in the months since October, by some counts. Well, add another slew of quitters to the score. Wednesday was "International Delete Your MySpace Account Day," according to fed-up MySpace user Simon Owens. On his blog, Owens lists 10 reasons he started the movement. My favorite: "You're tired of seeing Tom stare out at you from millions of friends lists and just wish he would change his fucking profile picture." Here's the rest.