Word on the intranets is that News Corp. has bought up Beliefnet.com, the spiritual website that won the General Excellence Online Ellie in 2007 in May. Numbers are not yet available, but News Corp. should have some liquid capital since their deal with LinkedIn is a no-go. A source close to the companies told Reuters that News Corp. is not in talks to buy LinkedIn for $1 billion.

Well, either way: A website about God and a social networking site without incriminating photos are equally useless to us.

So apparently Rupert Murdoch is in talks to take over LinkedIn. When Murdoch put his Midas media touch on MySpace, we were irked, but he can have LinkedIn.

Every few weeks, a random person asks us to “connect” on LinkedIn. And what does this connection do for us? Do we get to see their relationship status? Pictures of them binge drinking? Learn about their favorite books? No. At best we discover what this person majored in in college.

So enjoy LinkedIn, Rupert, because a social networking site without incriminating photos is no friend of ours.

After losing Facebook to Microsoft, Google has teamed with MySpace to develop a standard platform for third party developers called OpenSocial.

Small programmers will be able to create single application that will work on Orkut and MySpace, as well as smaller networking sites like Bebo, LinkedIn and Friendster.

Google is putting their money into the wrong technology. A cross-platform application that collects relationship status updates from all the social networking sites would be a lot more exciting than a universal Scrabble app.

When Miss New Jersey was blackmailed with incriminating photos from Facebook, older pageant winners must have wondered why she would allow such embarrassing shots of herself to go online. Reid Hoffman, chairman and president of LinkedIn, explained the prisoner’s dilemma that is social networking down in Florida to the American Magazine conference:

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