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In the December issue of Wired, contributing editor Noah Shachtman tells the story of Daniel Varo, one of three people shot to death by a friend in Tacoma, Washington. The group of friends had socialized in the real world and traded messages on the social networking site MySpace. The murder victims, and the killer, lived their lives surrounded by drugs and run-ins with the law.

Here's how Shachtman describes his story in an e-mail sent to friends and colleagues:

"When Varo died, his far-flung collection of relatives and friends gathered on MySpace, to console each other, to plan his memorial, and to vent their rage over his murder. People who had never met face-to-face suddenly became the most trusted of confidants. And along the way, they discovered that Varo didn't completely disappear when he died. Varo had had spent so much time online that scraps of his life lingered on the Web -- a ghost in the networked machines."

Here's a longer version of my interview with Shachtman.