LAFAYETTE - The mall and arcade are hangouts of the past.

The first place teens now go to talk with friends isn't a place at all. It's an online social networking site called MySpace.com.

There, and on other sites like it, teens blog to the world about their angst, joys, friends and crushes. They post pictures that would shock many parents, form relationships, flirt and fight.

"The things we did at the mall, the park and in parking lots - these kids don't have access to those places as much anymore - and so they're doing those things in their public space, which is MySpace," said Danah Boyd, a fellow at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communications.

But when a high-profile event comes into play, one's audience can rapidly expand. In the case of Tess Damm and her boyfriend, Bryan Grove - teen suspects in the slaying of Damm's mother, Linda Damm, of Lafayette - that audience now includes lawyers, detectives and journalists.

"People start looking for anything they can get their hands on to explain what happened, and MySpace is one of those places people turn to," Boyd said.

MySpace is nothing new to teens. But its repercussions - especially when seemingly private worlds go public - are still being ascertained. Tess Damm's and Bryan Grove's online profiles offer a public window into their lives that likely wouldn't exist otherwise. In hindsight, much of it is haunting.

Entries written by Tess portray a teen with a troubled relationship with her mother. She wrote about moving away from her "alcoholic" mother and identifies herself as bipolar.

"Everyone knows the story of me and my mom . . . and everyone knows how much I've tried to fix it my whole life," she wrote. "And everyone knows how it never works."

Grove's postings reveal his devotion to Tess, sometimes through poetry and sometimes through violent threats. In one entry, posted after Linda Damm's death, he wrote: "I did things that I shouldn't have . . . but I did them . . . with my two hands."

At its birth, MySpace was a way for lesser-known bands to get their music heard. It's now home to more than 100 million registered users.

It's especially popular for teens as they attempt to establish their identities, said Boyd, who specializes in youth interaction with public networking sites.

"In the process of understanding themselves, they put things out there," Boyd said. "Teens are always sharing what adults would consider intimate details with their friends. . . . This is how identity is derived."

Though many kids use the site as a place to "perform," Boyd said it's a way for them to derive context about who they are. They collect "friends" through MySpace whom they may never physically spend time with.

"It's like the kids you would hang out with at the mall but then not take home to your parents," she said.

Many teens mark their pages as private, meaning only approved friends may view them.

But for the millions of teens - and adults - with public pages, accessibility to their worlds is now available to the media, strangers, employers, police and sexual predators.

When crime enters the picture, detectives, lawyers, journalists and crime bloggers start looking, too.

Tess Damm's and Bryan Grove's MySpace pages have become the subject of stories nationwide, including a Time.com piece called "Murder, They Blogged."