Life sucks for a teenager with the wrong clothes. Internet companies, barely into their teens, are equally determined to have the right gear. Their latest craze is for social networking websites: Google has just guaranteed MySpace, the biggest such site, $900m (£472m) to carry its search engine until 2010. Other media companies, however, should exercise caution.

MySpace is the most popular content website in America. That made it a must-have for the big search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google won, and put a smile on the face of Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation bought MySpace for $580m last year. Viacom, meanwhile, is running the rule over MySpace competitor Bebo, at a price rumoured to exceed $1bn.