Just finished reading some speculation and rumors floating around at Mashable.com and Telegraph.co.uk regarding a possible takeover of social networking site Bebo.com by Yahoo!.  It’s not coming cheap either.  Yahoo is reported to be in discussing a $1 billion acquisition.  Telegraph.co.uk reports that Bebo has an estimated 25 million users worldwide, compared with MySpace.com’s 100 million users.  Yahoo! has attempted to buy its way into the social networking scene before when they offered a large amount of money for Facebook.com, only to have their offer rejected.

Why would you care?  What would Yahoo! want Bebo? Mashable suggests:

Why would Yahoo buy Bebo? Possibly because without MySpace, Facebook or YouTube, they don’t have a major stake in the social networking realm. Flickr is fairly big, and they have lots of smaller social sites, but nothing generic that lets them integrate all their other services.

The big three, Yahoo! / MSN / Google, are all about expanding their empire as far as possible.  Increasing their piece of the search market (multi-million dollar ad campaigns).  Buying advertising and marketing firms (DoubleClick and aQuantive being purchased for billion dollar figures).  Acquiring social networking sites where users congregate (Youtube purchased for $1.65 billion).  I’m surprised it wasn’t MSN or Yahooo that bought Myspace.  I wonder if MSN will come in with the big dollars to buy Facebook?