The official story will be that Jon Miller, the new broom from AOL, has swept aside MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and his team. But as always, Murdoch alone rules News Corp. And the decision must have been his.

Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, is the chair of MySpace China, and that professional relationship has spurred dangerous gossip which can't have helped DeWolfe's standing.

Four years after he bought MySpace, Murdoch has finally rid MySpace of the spammers and scammers who launched it. It is far past time — and yet probably the right moment. Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin's book, Stealing MySpace, has exposed MySpace's roots in porn, spam, and hacking. As the economic tide that boosted MySpace's advertising sales has receded, DeWolfe has been shown to be swimming naked. And Miller, as News Corp.'s newest Internet executive and the latest to have won Murdoch's ear, is in prime position to push out DeWolfe, whose contract expires this fall. (Just one question: If DeWolfe sidekick Tom Anderson is ousted, who will become every MySpace user's default first friend?)

DeWolfe always seemed more interested in throwing parties and dating celebrities than solving MySpace's hard problems. Growth has stagnated for the past year as Facebook has surged. The site's interface remains a shambolic wreck which fails at the most basic tasks, like remembering a user's login. Talented engineers, including COO Amit Kapur, have defected. Slingshot Labs, a MySpace spinoff meant to foster Silicon Valley-style innovation, is an industry laughingstock for launching a me-too celebrity gossip site rather than chasing genuinely new technologies. Given all this, it's possible that DeWolfe's friendship with Deng was the only thing that helped him last so long.

What now for the site? News Corp. is reportedly recruiting a new CEO already. Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta would be an excellent choice, if he can be wrested away from the music startup he's currently running. Or the company might place an internal candidate from the News Corp. empire, to provide the closer eye MySpace has long needed.

Ah, but those are tiresomely sensible choices. Here are two that would maximize the Murdoch family drama everyone loves: Install prodigal son Lachlan Murdoch. Or put Deng in charge.

The oddest thing about DailyFill's launch is its parent company: MySpace is part of the News Corp. empire, and it even carries items from Page Six, the stalwart gossip section of the New York Post. Page Six tried to launch its own gossip site, which got the slash in March after a three-month run. (Technically, the site came from Slingshot Labs, a MySpace-run incubator; Slingshot is ostensibly independent, but for all practical purposes, it exists to generate new sites and features for MySpace. You can tell how non-independent Slingshot actually is by how extremely touchy Slingshot employees get when you suggest it's part of MySpace.)

MySpace tends to run independently, even from Fox Interactive, the News Corp. division in which it's housed. And the social network's executives have absolutely zero shame about launching thoroughly derivative also-ran features. (You've probably never seen a MySpace Video embed, but you're not missing anything — it looks just like YouTube.)

DailyFill's in the same vein: It looks just like Yahoo's pictures-and-headlines OMG, which is, in turn, more or less a less texty clone of AOL's TMZ.

"We shat this out in a week," a MySpace engineer tells me.

The main difference from MySpace's other cloning experiments is that the MySpace brand is nowhere to be seen on the site. Could it be that MySpace, like AOL, is growing ashamed of the tawdry associations of its own brand? The site does have a small homage to its boss, however, in an item about MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe getting named to People's sexiest-dudes list.

Will Slingshot actually produce anything besides cushier jobs for restless talent at MySpace? Yahoo's Brickhouse is a cautionary tale. The San Francisco office was meant to house creative new projects — like Flickr, but built in-house. In practice, however, it's nearly impossible to pay employees as richly as the startup stock-option lottery does. A sinecure at a big company is less risky, and less rewarding. Will the likes of Granado produce a big payoff for MySpace? Unlikely. But it must be worth something to put studs out to pasture, rather than see them running with the herd at Facebook.