Should Yahoo Try Again for Facebook?

From The New York Times - Yahoo clearly wants a seat on the social-networking train. But how much should it spend for a ticket?

After years as the Web’s de facto welcome mat, Yahoo is facing competition on many fronts. Google, with its popular search service and an increasing number of Web applications, is part of the reason that Yahoo’s growth has stalled. But an analyst at Bear Stearns suggests that Yahoo is also being left behind by sites such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn — and said that an acquisition could be a good way to catch up.

Yahoo has already been thinking along these lines. It offered to pay nearly $1 billion last year for Facebook, which was originally an online hangout for college students but now allows anybody to log on and link up with their friends. More recently, News Corporation was reported to have offered to sell its MySpace unit to Yahoo in exchange for a large Yahoo stake, a proposal that Yahoo never publicly acknowledged. | Read full article