MySpace, rumored to be on the verge of purchasing the free music streaming site imeem, is struggling to keep up with its own payments to music copyright holders, according to a top News Corp (NWS) executive–a problem that has plagued every other licensed free music service.

The digital music doubters could be right with the contention that advertising revenue can’t cover the costs of licensing music. Meanwhile, illegitimate free music sources continue to proliferate, rendering paid music subscriptions irrelevant for most music fans.

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News Corp.’s (NWS) digital chief said Thursday that the company’s social-networking property MySpace is going in a different direction than rival Facebook, based on how its members socialize and share interests.

“Facebook, in some ways, is about what people are up to,” Jonathan Miller said during a keynote speech at the ad:tech conference in New York. MySpace, in contrast, “is about what people are into.”

MySpace in recent months has said it plans to focus on its appeal as an entertainment portal, where members can connect with their favorite bands and artists, as it has lost ground to status- and news-feed-heavy Facebook.

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A U.S. District Judge dismissed a lawsuit against Facebook by Power.com Thursday, the latest move in a back-and-forth legal battle between the two social-media services.

In December, Facebook blocked Power.com, a site that links members’ social-networking accounts, from accessing Facebook profiles. It also sued the company, accusing it of trademark and copyright violations.

Power.com countersued Facebook in July. Its founder, Steve Vachani, has noted that sites such as Twitter, MySpace and Google’s (GOOG) Orkut enable access from Power.com and said at the time that his suit was “about users’ control of their data.” It brought on as legal counsel Scott Bursor, who fought Verizon Wireless (VZ) and Sprint (S) in early-termination-fee disputes.

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A new executive team at MySpace is trying to reignite the brand by focusing on areas like music, videos and games as users abandon the social-networking site for cooler destinations.

MySpace, which is holding a conference this week for its global ad-sales staff, needs to lure visitors back and kick-start advertising revenue, ad executives say. Research firm eMarketer estimates U.S. ad spending on the site will be $495 million this year, down 15 percent from $585 million in 2008.

The basic challenge is similar to the one facing big Internet companies, such as Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL and Yahoo (YHOO), that are under pressure to reinvent themselves for fickle audiences.

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When it comes to social-networking sites, women are more plugged in than men, according to data analysis by Brian Solis, president of Silicon Valley public-relations firm Future Works.

Mr. Solis used Google (GOOG) Ad Planner to determine the gender breakdown of users signed up for the most popular social-networking sites and found that in most cases, women outnumbered men. “The point of interest that’s worth review and discussion is that in social media, women rule,” he wrote.

For example, the data show that on Facebook, 57 percent of users are women and 43 percent are men, with the same gender breakdown on Twitter and Yelp. On MySpace, it’s a whopping 64 percent female, and on the social-network-creation site Ning, 59 percent of users are women. There’s slightly more equitable gender distribution on YouTube, which is half women and half men, and professional-networking site LinkedIn has the same gender breakdown. On the photo-sharing site Flickr, women make up 55 percent of users, as they also do on FriendFeed.

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If the ongoing social networking revolution has you scratching your head and asking, “Why do people spend time on this?” and “How can my company benefit from the social network revolution?” you’ve got a lot in common with Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski.

Only difference: Piskorski has spent years studying users of online social networks (SN) and has developed surprising findings about the needs that they fulfill, how men and women use these services differently, and how Twitter–the newest kid on the block–is sharply different from forerunners such as Facebook and MySpace.

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Is that MySpace in the rear-view mirror, Twitter users may wonder? Why, yes, it is, at least in the UK. According to Hitwise, the web research company, the number of UK visits to Twitter exceeded that for MySpace in the UK for the last week of August.

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Tax deadbeats are finding someone actually reads their MySpace and Facebook postings: the taxman.

State revenue agents have begun nabbing scofflaws by mining information posted on social-networking Web sites, from relocation announcements to professional profiles to financial boasts.

In Minnesota, authorities were able to levy back taxes on the wages of a long-sought tax evader after he announced on MySpace that he would be returning to his home town to work as a real-estate broker and gave his employer’s name. The state collected several thousand dollars, the full amount due.

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Security firm Symantec (SYMC) has identified the top 100 searches conducted by children online. Popular items in the list include some expected entries like YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace as well as queries for popular pop idols like Michael Jackson and Miley Cyrus. However, what’s surprising about the children’s list is how similar it looks to that of any other online adult–something which seems to imply that our online activities aren’t all that age dependent after all.

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From behind their bedroom doors, more than 1 out of every 10 teenagers has posted a nude or seminude picture of themselves or others online–a “digital tattoo” that could haunt them for the rest of their lives, according to a poll being released today.

Aside from the nudity, the survey also found that at least a quarter of the young people polled had posted something they later regretted, made fun of others or created a false identity online.

While teens are spending more and more time on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace–with 22 percent saying they check their sites more than 10 times a day–they don’t seem to be aware of the long-term personal havoc they could create with a click of a button.

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SplashCast Corp., which lets people watch television shows within social networking sites, has been unable to raise new funding and has decided to shut down.

In March 2008, the Portland, Ore.-based company announced $4 million in Series A financing led by Australian media and advertising veteran Mark Bayliss with participation from angel group Emergent Growth Fund.

“We demonstrated that premium content applications in Facebook and MySpace can be monetized effectively with high-end display advertising,” Mike Berkley, SplashCast founder and CEO wrote in a blog post announcing the decision. “But that final chapter in the company’s history came too late, given our inability to convince the VC community to bet on us.”

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From uncles wearing skinny jeans to mothers investing in ra-ra skirts and fathers nodding awkwardly along to the latest grime record, the older generation has long known that the surest way to kill a youth trend is to adopt it as its own. The cyberworld, it seems, is no exception.

The proliferation of parents and teachers trawling the pages of Facebook trying to poke old schoolfriends and lovers, and traversing the outer reaches of MySpace is causing an adolescent exodus from the social networking sites, according to research from the media regulator Ofcom.

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The U.S. Marines Corps, citing security concerns, has banned Facebook, MySpace and Twitter on its network, and the Pentagon said it is reviewing social-networking sites as it considers setting broader policies on their use. The Marine ban formalizes an existing block on social-networking sites on its government computers, and it does not affect members’ personal use of the sites.

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Adknowledge, one of the largest independent online ad networks, announced Tuesday that it has acquired KITN Media, owner of Super Rewards, a virtual currency monetization platform for online games and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, for an undisclosed amount.

Super Rewards uses virtual currency as an incentive for online gamers in order to target them with advertising. For example, in games like Mob Wars or Spy Master, a user may get to skip a level or earn a weapon if he or she fills out a form to choose which kinds of ads are displayed on the page.

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Facebook said it will fight a countersuit filed by Power.com, saying the company puts Facebook’s member information at risk.

Power.com bills itself as a “social inter-networking site,” in which users can sign on to their other social accounts, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. It has some 8 million users.

That list once included Facebook. But the popular Palo Alto, Calif., site, which has more than 200 million active users, blocked Power.com and sued it late last year, accusing it of copyright and trademark violations.

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