MySpace, a good deal?

Since Rupert Murdoch acquired MySpace.com last year for $580 million, people have been jeering about the return of the Internet Bubble. Well, if you thought that was enough to make people groan, put in your ear plugs, because BusinessWeek is reporting that Facebook is on the market, and has just turned down offers approaching $750 million.

With MySpace.com getting way more page views than Facebook, looks like Murdoch might have got a proverbial bargain.

Is Facebook.com Five Buck Idea worthy? I certainly said so. But as Wikinews points out, blogger Josh Smith theorizes that “social networking” sites might be fronts for conservative data gathering evil-doers.

For Facebook, and Josh Smith, getting funding from Peter Thiel might just be a conservative movement to make a social-network land grab. He’s funded Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, among others. Add in funding from Accel Partners, “a firm whose manager James Breyer formerly served as the chairman of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm operated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency” [Wikipedia], there’s a nice conspiracy theory brewing here.

Either way, let’s get back to the economics of it. $500k from Peter Thiel and $12.7M from Accel Partners gets Facebook off the ground for two years. Them blammo, looking for $2B now? Sheesh. Someone’s going to make some serious cash.

Is the boom back? Hard to argue against it. How long is it going to last? All we have to do is look at the portfolios of the internet companies that actually have been doing all the buying lately: Google, Yahoo!, and Ebay. Mix in media giants like News Corp., ViaCom, etc., and you should be able to figure out how much time is left on the clock.

Interesting times we live in.