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There's desperate — and then there's "paying $15 billion for second-place has-been social network MySpace" desperate. Not even Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, under pressure from a mixed-up Microsoft, angry shareholders, and crazy-old-coot corporate raider Carl Icahn to do some kind of deal, is that desperate. Yang is taking so much heat for blowing merger negotiations with Microsoft, botching the company's reorg, and losing top talent that he's probably going to lose his job come August 1, when the company holds an annual shareholder meeting. But despite all that, a source close to the company told Reuters that Yang refused a bailout deal with News Corp. that would have combined Yahoo with MySpace because "News Corp. sought a value of as much as $15 billion for those assets." At long last, we're happy to credit Yang for a smart move!

Relative to social network rival Facebook, MySpace's popularity is fading, and its not hard to see why. The site is a design nightmare — not just in a fussy aesthetic sense, but in lacking a basic ability to go from page to page and perform functions — and it has a history of antagonism toward third-party widgetmakers who could improve its features. More importantly, MySpace has disappointed financially. Sure, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and company successfully pawned off its search-ads business to Google for $900 million in 2006, butGoogle CEO Eric Schmidt always jumps at the chance to tell reporters exactly how awful that deal has been for Google so far.