Rumours are starting to swirl around the blogosphere that Microsoft will buy Facebook for $US6 billion ($NZ5.98 billion). Microsoft is, of course, chasing Google, and a social networking service is conspicuouslylacking from its portfolio. Six billion dollars seems crazy, but that's the amount Microsoft recently dropped to buy online advertising specialist aQuantive.

It's certainly a hot area. After a worldwide survey of 6500 adults, market researcher Ipsos Insight estimates that 1 in 5 belong to a soc-net site, rising to 1 in 4 in the US, and 1 in 2 in Korea.

Tomorrow morning, an ambitious start-up is going to announce a New Zealand-developed social networking service. Where MySpace and Bebo are for teens, this will be a soc-net site "for grown-ups". Hmm, can you say "Facebook" and "LinkedIn"?

Meanwhile, is it just me, or has the NZ membership of Facebook gone crazy over the past couple of weeks? Certainly, like LinkedIn, it's broken through into the mainstream, with seemingly every media and IT industry person on one or the other (curiously, few are found on Google's soc-net service, Orkut).

Is there room for yet another? Check in tomorrow afternoon and I'll let you know what bright ideas our budding Kiwi networkers had to offer.