The Web has been buzzing that NBC is poised to pay a pittance for Tribe.net, an online social network that has seen its growth stall. The story has been trickling out since early last week when Valleywag reported that NBC had signed a letter of intent to buy the business. NBC isn't spreading its wings to embrace Tribe's small user base -- mostly the crowd of ravers and Burning Man devotees from which the site grew. Rather, the Peacock wants to pluck Tribe's social-networking software to beef up iVillage, the women's site for which it paid $600 million in March. PaidContent.org followed on Thursday suggesting the company might fetch as much as $50 million, but quickly revised that number downward by Friday to "less than $5 million." That sale price is nothing to rave about.

The fire sale suggests how tricky it is to get social networks to "go critical" -- that is, attract enough users that peer pressure starts drawing others in, as happened with MySpace. It also stands as another cautionary tale for old media. In late 2003, when MySpace was not yet a gleam in Rupert Murdoch's eye, Knight Ridder, The Washington Post and venture firm Mayfield Partners put $6.5 million into Tribe in the hopes that it might emerge as a Craigslist competitor in local markets. That hope has now gone up in a puff of funny-smelling smoke.

Can NBC make good where its newspaper rivals couldn't? One TechCrunch reader expresses his skepticism in caveman-speak: "...old media desperate. Old media should stick to wheel, leave fire to professionals."