The conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is that MySpace, based in Los Angeles, is a tech nightmare, blaring songs through a user's speakers while crashing all the time. Skilled engineers are in short supply down south, so the website must be falling over all the time, right? Not so. Pingdom, a website-monitoring…

Now we know why Bebo's so eager for more cash. It needs more servers. According to Pingdom, Bebo has already been down for 12 hours and 28 minutes so far this year. Check out the full chart to see how 13 other social networks have fared so far.

If at first you don't succeed — and you can't manage to buy someone — try, try again. That's what Google and Yahoo, realizing the failure of their social-networking products, are doing. Google's Orkut is a nonstarter outside India and Brazil, and Yahoo 360 is, well, a nonstarter everywhere. Here's how the two giants…