Facebook is threatening to sue the Daily Mail after the tabloid wrongly claimed that one of its freelance writers, a middle aged man, had successfully posed as a 14 year old girl on the uber-social network and that, "within seconds" he was approached by older men who "wanted to perform a sex act" (or, possibly, a 14 year old girl writing for a rival paper successfully posing as an older man, who knows?).

The Mail's big mistake was that while said freelance writer - Mark Williams-Thomas - had indeed posed as a 14 year old girl on a social network and had indeed been approached by a dodgy older man, the social network he was using was not Facebook, and he claims that the paper were well aware of that fact but incorrectly edited his article to name the market-leading social networking site anyway.

Facebook quickly threatened a libel action, and The Mail subsequently removed the firm's name from the story online and published an apology. Well, I say they removed the firm's name from the report online, they did cut it from the article and headline, but Facebook say they are still name-checked in the story's page title and URL, both of which influence Google searches. The paper admitted that because of "technical issues" (ie, no one at the Mail knows how to work a website) that was indeed still the case, but that the paper was now getting those Facebook mentions removed too.

Nevertheless, Facebook says it is still consulting its lawyers over the reputation damage done by the original story, and the paper's slow removal of all elements of it. A UK spokesman told the Guardian that the company was assessing what "brand damage has been done".

Facebook have told TechCrunch "we have no plans to launch a music service", which is a pretty unequivocal statement and probably means Facebook Music will go live on Monday.

There has been chatter for years now that Facebook would launch some sort of proprietary music service to compete with MySpace's music platform, the strong link to music being the latter's only real USP over the former for sometime now.

For a while Facebook were in talks with Universal's ultimately canned digital music venture TotalMusic, and had Universal been able to persuade all of its major label competitors to get involved (it was Warner who were the main hold out) a Facebook-branded TotalMusic streaming and download service might now be operational.

After Facebook and TotalMusic stopped working together, talk of a Facebook music service died down. But MySpace's acquisition of iLike last year made some speculate that Facebook might again look to create some sort of official music facility, given that iLike control the most popular music-based third-party app used by Facebook users.

TechCrunch approached the social networking firm for clarification on its music plans this week, after someone noticed a mysterious official looking 'music app' was appearing in some people's application settings lists on Facebook. But the social networking company say that was a mistake.

If Facebook have decided once and for all to stay out of the digital music domain that's probably good news for MySpace, who are increasingly positioning themselves as an entertainment platform rather than a true social networking community. It's just a shame that the expanded MySpace Music service - launched here in the UK late last year of course - is so totally awful. It's enjoyed some success in the US, but when Spotify launches there (or more American music fans start to discover Grooveshark), you really have to wonder how long MySpace's music service can continue to trundle along in its current form.