Wily old Rupert Murdoch. His media conglomerate, News Corporation, is in talks to merge its social network site, MySpace, with Yahoo, reports the Wall Street Journal. Why is this so clever?

Jerry Yang is desperate to avoid selling to Microsoft: the Yahoo founder, like most Silicon Valley bigwigs, hates the lumbering software giant to the north; the big bad media mogul is cuddly in comparison. Yahoo's long felt the absence of a social network site: it tried and failed to acquire Facebook. And Murdoch's keen to cash in on his smart investment in MySpace, which is worth about ten times what he paid for it. For a 76-year-old, the media mogul is surprisingly faddish: he's noted that rival Facebook is adding users more rapidly than MySpace; and is demonstrably more enamored with the venture's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, than MySpace Tom and his own team.

So this might be a good moment to get out. News Corp., which certainly can't afford to mount a competing bid for Yahoo after spending $6bn on Dow Jones, already floated the idea of a swap of the social network for Yahoo stock last year, in the Times of London, which Murdoch owns. With Bill Gates' Microsoft the alternative, Yahoo may now be more receptive.