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We posted last year about the prevalence of cyberbullying on social networks. The longer-term consequences of that are just now finding their way into our legal system, and this week the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case of Doninger v. Niehoff, which was the case involving a high school junior girl named Avery Doninger. Back in 2007, she criticized school officials for not allowing a student concert, and said on her LiveJournal blog that the "douchebags in central office" had cancelled the event. Niehoff was the principal, and was granted "qualified immunity" from Doninger's suit. This is the part of the law that shield's public officials from legal liability when there is no clear case law. By not hearing the appeal, this decision of qualified immunity stands.

When the site relaunches later this year, former social networking heavyweight MySpace will aim to reclaim the position it once held as a preeminent hub for music.

MySpace went through several attempts to reinvent itself before being sold by News Corp in June. Its new marketing head Al Dejewski told Ad Age the company will shift its focus more intently on music and try to compete against the likes of Spotify and iTunes, .

MySpace's fall from glory is now complete; Kara Swisher reports that it has been sold off to an advertising network for $35 million, an incredible decline in value from the $580 million that Newscorp paid for the social network in 2005.

Why did MySpace fail? Why have Facebook and Twitter stolen its thunder? That will be a question for the ages, but one contributing factor may be the incredible hostility that MySpace had for outside application developers. MySpace thought, and said publicly, that all the rest of Web 2.0 was a leach, a monkey on MySpace's back. Below, an excerpt from a TechCrunch post I wrote about this five years ago. It looks pretty amazing now in retrospect and is a good reminder that today's leading companies should remember their humility.

Facebook is now "getting serious about music and media," writes Om Malik on GigaOm.com, revealing unannounced details regarding the social network's new ambition to be a place to discover music with friends. The deal involves partnerships with the internationally popular music streaming service Spotify, and possibly other music services, too, currently in talks with Facebook.

Sharing music with friends? Sounds like the final death knell for MySpace, doesn't it?

It was just last week when the privacy-focused Facebook alternative Diaspora posted an update on its development status, promising to "go faster." It may need to do just that not only to please its community and woo new users, but to help stave off the competition from yet another startup that's just announced its plans to also provide a privacy-focused social network.

This one's called Altly, and it announced its plans to build an alternative to Facebook today with a lengthy manifesto on why privacy, personal data control, and data portability should matter.

NPR music podcast All Songs Considered just released a show about breaking up with your favorite bands. It got me thinking about favorite web apps or services that I've broken up with. So in the tradition of Internet era music, I'm going to directly rip NPR's idea and breakup categories.

In this post I tearfully discuss past relationships with MySpace, Last.fm and Soup.io. I finish with a love story that has a happier ending: Flickr. I'd love to hear your own tales of web app woe in the comments.

The death knells of the first generation of social media platforms continue. A day after Friendster announced that it would be deleting photos and blog posts from its platform, reports surface that News Corp is selling off Myspace and is starting the bidding at $100 million.

News Corp bought the one-time social media titan in 2005 for $580 million and it has been bleeding money for several years. The move by News Corp to accept bids is akin to a sports franchise that tries to trade an underperforming player to get some nominal value before it has to just cut its losses and release him from the team.

Companies used to pay millions of dollars to splash advertisements on the front page of MySpace, back when that social network was the hottest one on the web. One of the people in charge of selling those ads was Rita Garg, a Stanford and Harvard educated mathematician and economist.

Today Garg announced, in a Tweet, that she's left MySpace and is now working on business development at Twitter Inc. Twitter keeps scooping up the leaders from other giant tech companies, ReadWriteWeb reported first last month that Bing chief scientist Alek Kołcz left Microsoft to join Twitter as well. That sounds like as good a use of the company's coffers filled with venture capital as any.