E-Mail This Article to a Friend FOLLOW-UP It’s my space now! BY CAMILLE DODERO

Whenever MySpace president Tom Anderson wants to communicate with his social-network site’s 22-million-plus users, the omnipresent host posts a message that appears above every user’s inbox. In the past, the 29-year-old musician/entrepreneur has mostly used this tool to quell absurd MySpace-related rumors. Like on Tuesday, July 5, he wrote: "no, myspace will not be shut down ... no, I’m not darth vader. no, I’m not the father of britney’s unborn child."

But last week there was a legitimate rumor, verified by external news sources: neocon billionaire Rupert Murdoch announced that he was purchasing Intermix, MySpace’s parent company, for $580 million. The fifth-most-visited domain on the Web would now be relegated to News Corp.’s brand-new Fox Interactive Media division. The 22-million-member online home — a place for "people to put their lives online" — will now be the property of a conservative corporate colossus.

The following Friday, a day after the Phoenix’s MySpace cover story hit the streets (see "Lost in MySpace," News and Features, July 22), Anderson posted another message, attempting to assuage concerns that his site would become a whitewashed, privacy-invading, expletive-censoring territory.

Many of you have asked about NewsCorp buying MySpace ... Everyone seems scared that MySpace is going to change. I’m not leaving, and I’m still making the decisions about the site, and I’m not going to let things suck.

The rumors people are reposting in bulletins are not true: 1) we are not going to become a pay site. 2) we are not increasing advertising. 3) we are not allowing anyone to monitor the site. 4) we are not deleting any content or censoring people in any new way. (we’ve always deleted nude pics and hate speech) 5) we are not exploiting anyone's data or violating anyone’s privacy.

MySpace has been my life for almost two years now. I know its as important to others as it is to me. I won’t let it get jacked up.

Despite Anderson’s reassurance, there has been a ripple of angry-user responses since the News Corp. buyout. One user wiped his page of personal information (www.myspace.com/thom_atx) and left an anti–Rupert Murdoch screed in its wake. An illustration of Anderson walking away with money-stuffed duffle bags has made the rounds. Murdoch now has 40-plus MySpace faux-profiles mocking the site’s new 74-year-old overlord. ("I just bought MySpace.com, soon I will own the rest of the internet," reads www.myspace.com/murdoch_rupert.)

But a major MySpace exodus doesn’t seem imminent. The "MySpace sucks but I use it anyway" group hasn’t posted about the sale, nor has "Fuck MySpace" or a handful of other "MySpace sucks" groups. Google searches for "MySpace exodus," "boycott MySpace," and "MySpace sucks" don’t turn up much more than they did last week.

Clay N. Ferno, who is yet to be disproven as Boston’s most popular person(3622 MySpace friends, at last count), isn’t too surprised that News Corp. is buying MySpace. He just hopes that Anderson’s message was sincere. "If usability is altered in any way, or MySpace goes offline, that would be a real bummer," he writes in an e-mail. "Big Brother might be collecting information about us through this acquisition. But you know what? It doesn’t matter one bit: they are doing it right now in a billion different ways."

It’s unclear how much longer MySpace will be able to market itself as the indie artist’s friend. Anderson is still presenting himself as Everyman’s friend, even sending me a nice, personalized (for real) MySpace message apologizing for not giving me a comment for my story, explaining that he’d been away in China "looking to see how we could expand there." For the moment, he doesn’t have to worry about expansion: as of Tuesday, Anderson has 22,977,357 friends, 821,067 more than he had the week before. That figure is slightly higher than the population of North Korea. And now Rupert Murdoch is our Kim Jong Il.