Last week, the founders of MySpace Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson stepped down from the helm of their popular social networking site. This week, former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta took over as CEO of MySpace and named his new management team.

Forget corporate intrigue. This is a victory of the geeks over the cool kids.

Facebook's story is the classic geek fairy tale: smart kid drops out of Harvard and writes computer code in a Palo Alto sublet, quickly winning fame and fortune.

MySpace's story runs differently. Some cool kids from Los Angeles find their spyware business going south, so they slap together a copy-cat version of a popular site called Friendster.  They give their site a nightclub vibe, stock it with musicians and models, and stumble their way to fame and fortune.

If Facebook is The New Yorker, MySpace is TigerBeat. Teen girls decorate their MySpace pages with glitter and pictures of themselves in bikinis. Teen boys use MySpace to live out their rock-star fantasies.

Facebook began as an exclusive club for Ivy League students. It claims a math-based approach to friendship, christening social networks as "social graphs." It prohibits users from decorating their pages with fluorescent backgrounds. And Facebook's status updates forces users to speak in more or less complete sentences.

MySpace's non-techie community was initially more popular than Facebook's. In November 2006, MySpace surpassed Yahoo as the most popular Web site in America, by some measures. Its triumph proved you didn't have to be an Ivy League brainiac to dominate the Internet economy.

But Facebook fought back with better technology. It built the revolutionary News Feed that delivered news about your friends to your page - so you didn't have to go visit their pages for updates. It opened up its site to third-party developers. It endlessly tweaked and improved its privacy settings so you could keep your mom from viewing your party pictures.

MySpace was slow to match Facebook's technology features. It focused instead on entertainment, launching a celebrity news site and a music site.

Slowly but surely, the geeks overtook their Hollywood rivals. Last April, Facebook surpassed MySpace in worldwide audience and is gaining on MySpace in the U.S. This spring, Yahoo surpassed MySpace in page views, pushing MySpace to the number two spot.

Now the MySpace founders have been pushed out, replaced by a former Facebook executive. The cool kids are at the back of the bus; the geeks are in the drivers seat.

But this is the Internet. Nothing lasts forever. Apparently there are some guys in San Francisco who've built an even faster car called Twitter. Heard of it?

This was first published on the NPR Opinion page.

MySpace had its two and half years as the most popular kid on the block - and now it's over.

MySpace is no longer the 'most popular Web site in America' as described in the subtitle of my book. In March, that mantle officially passed back to Yahoo, as measured by comScore Media Metrix's report on the number of Web pages viewed by U.S. visitors to each site in March. (Yahoo held the page view No.1 spot until November 2006.)

MySpace has no one to blame but itself for this situation. For two and a half years, it has been sitting idly by while Facebook has been eating its lunch. (By another comScore Media Metrix metric, of worldwide unique visitors, Facebook already surpassed MySpace last fall.)

For the past few years, Facebook has been pimping out its News Feed with more and more features (sometimes too many features, admittedly) and expanding overseas on a shoestring budget. At the same time, MySpace has used its much larger stream of advertising revenues to launch a separate MySpace Music venture (um, isn't MySpace all about music already?) as well as a celebrity news site.

In short: MySpace has focused on content, not features. But MySpace is a site where people come to network with each other first and foremost, which means networking tools are important. Yet, MySpace's blogging, instant messaging, friending and commenting tools have not improved significantly in the past three years. Even features that MySpace purchased have been slow to arrive: In April 2006, MySpace bought the online karaoke service kSolo. MySpace launched the karaoke feature on its site in April 2008 - two years later!

It wasn't always this way. When MySpace launched in August 2003, its founders were nimble. They didn't always write the most robust computer code, but they responded quickly to members' demands. When they mistakenly allowed users to enter HTML into their profile pages, they decided not to fix the mistake once it proved popular with users. When members suggested features they wanted, MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson worked around the clock to accommodate requests.

There's still value at MySpace. It has a huge audience in the U.S. and worldwide. It's profitable - although that could change when its lucrative Google deal expires next year. And unlike Facebook, it offers advertisers an array of large, colorful spots to place their ads and sophisticated targeting of ads.

Former AOL CEO Jonathan F. Miller has just been appointed to oversee MySpace for its parent company News Corp. (full disclosure: News Corp. is also my employer at The Wall Street Journal). Miller will need to quickly take MySpace back to its roots - back to a time when the company motto was "Get it out fast, fix it later." Only this time, MySpace had better get it out fast and get it right.

MySpace has always seemed like a dangerous place. Its blinking backgrounds, blaring music and provocative photos have sparked fear in many a parent, myself included.

But it's never been totally clear just how risky it is for kids to hang out on MySpace and other social networks. Sure, there are the sensational stories of children being kidnapped or harassed by people they met on the site, but the data also shows that most kids use social media sites to innocuously chat with their friends. 

Confusing the issue for the past few years has been the ongoing crusade by a coalition of state attorneys general to make MySpace "safe" by demanding that the site adopt technology to verify the ages of MySpace members and ensure that teens younger than 13 do not join the site. In theory, verifying identities would prevent sex offenders from harassing our children, and bullies from picking on other children online.

In reality, however, it turns out verifying identities is not likely to prevent these crimes. A Wired magazine investigation found that many sex offenders were hanging out on MySpace using their real names. And many bullies are also known - often quite well - to their victims.

Luckily, the attorney generals jihad died a well-deserved death last week, when a coalition of well-respected academics and child safety researchers, led by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, decreed that age and identity verification technology alone would not make social networking sites safer and urged parents to get more involved in their kids digital lives.

Left unsaid by the researchers was the important fact that the attorney generals crusade for age and identity verification technology represented an assault on our constitutionally protected right to speak anonymously.  Even one of our founding fathers, Ben Franklin, often published under a pseudonym.
 
The right to anonymous speech is especially important now, as it has become harder for political groups to gather in public spaces without seeking police permits and submitting to identity verification. The Obama campaign - which utilized MySpace, Facebook and other social media tools - is testament to the tremendous political organizing power of the Internet.

Yes, there are difficult aspects of free speech. But we must not give it up rashly. A better approach would be to find ways to keep our kids safe online through less draconian means. As a wise person once said, the price of liberty is constant vigilance.