What in the world is going on?  Everyone is buying they get their hands on and might I add paying way more than its worth.  Yes it is known fact that more eyeballs equals more advertising dollars, but buying everything you get your hand on, reminds lot of people of dot com era.  Recently, there is lot of buzz in the industry of online advertising bubble bursting.  Are critics just being overly cautious or are they right?

After acquisition of aQuantive for $6 Billion by Microsoft, news of Yahoo purchasing Bebo.com for $1 billion is in talks and Google going after Feedburner.  Let’s see who else is left in the market?  Facebook.com - now that’s the site i really like and i believe Yahoo was in talks with them few months ago but apparently it didn’t work out.  Main question would be, if Facebook were to be on sale, how much would it go for?  Easily in billions considering how three giants (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) have open their wallets to everyone and anyone.  Craziness if you ask me.  First it was Google buying YouTube, then Microsoft buying portion of (80% i believe ) of CareerBuilder.com, Google buying DoubleClick, Yahoo buying Right Media, MySpace buying Photobucket, Microsoft buying aQuantive, and now talks of Yahoo buying Bebo.com and Google going after Feedburner - holy smokes. 

Like i was saying earlier, only player that remains to be bought out is Facebook.com - just came across an article on it TechCrunch.com.  I kinda agree and disagree with portions of the post on Techcrunch.  Yahoo is definitely out, so it comes down to Google and Microsoft.  Yes it does make sense for Google to buy it, but it ALSO makes sense for Microsoft to purchase it.  It will be MS’s entry into social networking, plus Microsoft already has existing banner advertisement deal with Facebook, why not take it to the next level and purchase the darn company.  I’m not quiet sure if Facebook going public makes lot of sense.

So let’s see who eats up Facebook.com and how far, G, Y, and M will go to purchase this hot property.

Tejas