In Teens' Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year

New fake sites of Quantrille and her friends reappeared three weeks ago, prompting some to move to Facebook, where users have to register using a school or business e-mail, making it feel safer.

MySpace going mainstream also attracts unwanted attention.

Dell'Aria said teachers at her previous high school started logging onto MySpace and reading students' profiles, apparently monitoring the pages for signs of alcohol or drug abuse.

"I was shocked and kind of annoyed, and it was kind of an invasion of privacy," she said. Although no one got in trouble, word spread like wildfire, and many of her classmates reset their privacy settings to block unapproved users from accessing their pages, she said.

Liana Castro, a junior in the literary media department of Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, said having an online social life intesified the drama in her real life.

She routinely heard from people who complained they weren't designated as one of her top eight friends. "People would be like, 'why am I not in your top eight?' " With 279 online friends, Castro caught so much grief she changed the site so it only listed four family members.

Her profile also landed her in hot water when a boy she didn't like kept asking to be her online friend. "I kept deleting the message," she said. "He got mad."

Watching as their peers deal with such fallout, some vow not to engage in the phenomenon at all.

Evan Hansen, a sophomore at Falls Church High School, said he didn't buy into the MySpace hype and is waiting for the craze to die.

"Over time, people are going to get sick of talking to people on the computer," he said. "I just think people will want to spend more time with each other -- without the wall of technology."