The piper always comes calling for payment.

Mischa Barton was charged Tuesday with misdemeanor DUI and pot possession in connection with her December arrest in West Hollywood following a traffic stop. 

Per court documents obtained by E! News, she is facing a count apiece of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, driving while having a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 percent or higher, driving without a valid license and possession of 28.5 grams or less of marijuana. (View the complaint.)

“We are pleased that the District Attorney’s Office has very carefully reviewed all the evidence in Ms. Barton’s matter and has chosen to file only misdemeanor charges against her,” Barton’s attorney, Anthony Salerno, said in a statement released by her publicist to E! News.

“The D.A.’s Office is to be commended for treating this case the same as it would any other matter; Ms. Barton has received no special treatment, and they have done the same diligent review that they do in every case.

“As previously stated, Ms. Barton has taken full responsibility for any mistakes in judgment that she may have made.  We will, of course, conduct a full review of all evidence received from the D.A.’s Office before making any final decisions on the resolution of the legal issues, but we are confident that this matter will be handled by both sides in a professional and respectful manner.”

The former OC star was busted Dec. 27 shortly before 3 a.m., when police pulled her over after spotting her white Range Rover straddling two lanes. She then failed to signal before making a left turn, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Barton was booked at the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station and released at 10:10 a.m. later that morning after posting $10,000 bail.

The 22-year-old later told E! News anchor Ryan Seacrest that she was fully aware she had messed up.

“Obviously, I’m 100 percent responsible for my actions in this case, and I’m really disappointed in myself,” Barton said during Seacrest’s KIIS-FM morning show. “I don’t know what to say about it, except I’m not perfect. I just don’t ever intend to do something this stupid again.”

Barton’s arraignment is scheduled for Thursday.  Salerno says he’ll appear on her behalf.

Life is getting more difficult for social-networking sites.

At the same time Facebook’s traffic appears to have reached a plateau, News.com has learned that Piczo, a networking site that caters to teenage girls and was much written about in 2006, has seen layoffs, executive departures, high employee turnover, and a shrinking audience in the past five months.

Three former Piczo employees described a company grappling with the meteoric rise of competitors Facebook and Bebo and internal squabbles over the direction of the 3-year-old start-up. Piczo has also struggled to convince skeptical advertisers of the effectiveness of social networking as an ad vehicle–a tough sales pitch for the entire sector, say insiders.

Parker Ranney, the company’s former director of operations who left to join a start-up in January, said Piczo’s layoffs were designed to help the San Francisco-based company “restructure so it could put more focus on Europe.” But he also said Piczo is working through “an issue of monetization” just like everybody else in social networking.

Jeremy Verba, Piczo’s CEO, said two employees were laid off in November. He declined to discuss how many people have left the company since then. Verba said Piczo now has 32 employees. But two sources who wished to remain anonymous because they might have to work with Piczo again said Friday that about 10 additional people left the company soon after the layoffs. The total number of departures equaled about 25 percent of Piczo’s then 40-employee staff.

In addition to Ranney, the company’s director of technology and vice president of marketing also left to join other companies. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch was first to report on the departure of Piczo’s marketing vice president back in November. He wrote then: “Employees generally don’t leave hot startups.”

WPP announced today that it has acquired a stake in Israeli Web analytics company NuConomy, although it would not reveal how big a stake it has or how much it was worth.

The NuConomy platform appears to be in beta, judging from the company’s Web site, but claims to “measure consumers’ engagement and interaction with content, while giving advertisers actionable insight into the audience they engage with.”

The acquisition follows a handful of recent WPP investments in digital media firms, including Integrated Media Measurement Inc., VideoEgg, SpotRunner and Dutch interactive agency LaCommunidad. Rumors that it would make a move to acquire the outstanding share of SpotRunner have been circulating for months, with no new developments.

Flock, the innovative social Web browser, today announced that they will add MySpace as a supported service for its rapidly growing audience of users. Building on the MySpace Developer Platform, Flock will allow users to surf the Web with their MySpace friends constantly available from within the Flock browser.

On Tuesday, February 5th in San Francisco, Flock took part in the MySpace developer platform kick-off. At the event Flock, along with other innovative companies, demonstrated its integration with the MySpace platform. Flock developers provided attendees with a sneak peak at features that will allow Flock users to connect with their MySpace friends and share a variety of content.

“Our users want to be connected with their favorite friends across all the sites they visit,” said Shawn Hardin, CEO of Flock. “MySpace has been the most frequently requested social networking service by our users and we are excited to be able to offer it to the Flock community.”

In addition to MySpace, Flock supports many of today’s most popular social networking services and applications. Flock currently supports video and photo sharing services such as YouTube, Truveo, Photobucket, and Flickr. With the addition of MySpace to its stable of supported services, the Flock browser allows users to share across a much broader variety of networks and friends with a simple drag-and-drop action, making their user experience easier and more connected than what is possible with conventional browsers.

Flock is available for free download at http://www.flock.com.

About Flock

Flock - The Social Web Browser - is built on Mozilla’s constantly improving Firefox architecture. It is free to download and use at www.flock.com. Flock simplifies and extends the use of social and web-based applications to enable the richest user experience possible across information-gathering, sharing, communication, self-expression and interaction. Flock delivers a more personal experience of the web, where its users are in control and more connected to what they value. Flock was founded in 2005. The company is based in Mountain View, CA, with an office in Victoria, British Columbia.

InfoSpace, Inc. (NASDAQ:INSP) today announced that Chairman and CEO, Jim Voelker and CFO, David Binder will present at the Thomas Weisel Partners Technology, Telecom and Internet Conference in San Francisco, CA. The presentation is scheduled for Thursday, February 7th at 9:45 a.m. Pacific time. A live audio webcast of the presentation will be available under the Events tab in the Investor Relations section of the InfoSpace corporate Web site, at www.infospaceinc.com.About InfoSpace, Inc.InfoSpace, Inc. is a leading developer of metasearch products to help people easily search and discover the web. InfoSpace uses its proprietary metasearch technology that combines the top results from the leading search engines to power a portfolio of branded Web sites, including Dogpile (www.dogpile.com) and WebFetch (www.webfetch.com.) For the second consecutive year, Dogpile ranked highest in customer satisfaction among search engines, according to JD Power and Associates. More information can be found at www.infospaceinc.com.