I thought MySpace was so . . . 2006. Everyone I know has defected for Facebook and left her MySpace profile to molder, un-updated, into obsolescence.

Apparently not. According to the web research firm Hitwise, although Facebook’s numbers are indeed on the rise whereas

MySpace’s are on the wane, MySpace is still the Web’s most popular social networking site, according to several different metrics. In February, more than 70 million people logged onto MySpace to groom their own personal homepages, upload pictures and video, browse through and link to friends’ pages, and post messages.

Which is good news for Julia Angwin, who has written a thorough new book called Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America. Angwin, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has painstakingly detailed every crucial conversation, every rise and fall in stock price, every lavish party and influential blog post in the history of MySpace, from its start as a side project in a shady Los Angeles Internet company to its current place as the crown jewel in Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Interactive Media. The book is an excellent historical record but a somewhat dry read.

Stealing MySpace opens with the meeting in which Murdoch and the chief executive of Intermix Media — then MySpace’s parent company — sealed their gentlemen’s agreement. As was widely reported at the time, Murdoch’s News Corporation spent $580 million to purchase Intermix. (Angwin reports that when stock options and promised salaries are taken into account, the deal was actually worth more like $750 million.)

Intermix, which had only recently disentangled itself from several investigations into its spyware division, and whose most profitable venture was a wrinkle-cream business, was not exactly a prize. But it owned a majority stake in MySpace, and because of a complicated ownership agreement, Intermix could sell itself out from under MySpace’s feet. Which, in July 2005, is exactly what it did.

Still, the high-stakes backroom dealings between News Corp, Intermix, and other companies (like Viacom) that were angling to buy MySpace, make up only 27 pages of the book. Since Stealing MySpace would seem to be about precisely that dealmaking, its remaining 100 pages feel a little aimless; once the deal is done, there is little narrative tension to propel the rest of the story forward. That the story ends 2 1/2 years after News Corp’s acquisition seems arbitrary.

What’s more, the characters are not portrayed as sympathetic, three-dimensional people with real lives, but rather as game pieces in business deals. People are the beating heart of any story — it’s a heady mix of ego, idealism, greed, ambition, and a million other human qualities that make any deal go down (and that make investors buy stock, and that make an entrepreneur found a company, and on and on), and a book provides an author with the space that a newspaper article does not to showcase these complicated motivations. The fact that Angwin doesn’t do so makes the book read less like Barbarians at the Gate than like, well, The Wall Street Journal.

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