Creative Capital got ahold of the December 2007 ComScore numbers for the top social networks in the U.S. — and they are, on the whole, not good. Engagement — average minutes spent on the site per visitor — is down for MySpace and Microsoft's Live Spaces, but up for almost all the other sites. Unique visitor growth is ominously low for MySpace and, in the last three months, LinkedIn. Hit the jump to see the numbers for yourself.

LinkedIn is off the block, cofounder Reid Hoffman told the Sydney Morning Herald. "We have had (buyout) conversations with all the usual suspects, but I think an IPO is by far and away the most likely outcome," Hoffman said. He suggested, however, that such a public offering might not happen for at least another year or two. One ex-LinkedIn exec said that's much too long a wait.

The party line on LinkedIn's competition with Facebook is that the two sites serve different markets, and LinkedIn has nothing to worry about from the rise of Facebook's popularity among Silicon Valley professionals. LinkedIn's professional focus makes it a favorite of recruiters. Except, that is, for LinkedIn's recruiters, who have been placing job ads, like the one above, for engineers on Facebook. LinkedIn's HR department, meet LinkedIn's PR department. You might want to have some words with each other.

Like we told you it would, LinkedIn announced a homepage redesign, a new developer platform today, and LinkedIn News. Here's some dude wearing a too-tight T-shirt to explain the news. He's Adam Nash, LinkedIn's senior director of product. (Ed.'s note: The T-shirt is just fine, Adam. And I emphasize the word "fiiiiine.") The high point: Not once does he promise to change media for the next 100 years.

Remember OpenSocial, Google's open-source platform for building applications that let users throw sheep at each other on any social network, not just Facebook? "At this point it looks like we'll make a couple more revisions to the API before it's baked enough for launch," Googler Arne Roomann-Kurrik tells partners in a Google Group dedicated to OpenSocial. "This puts us into January before the API is ready. Expect some early adopters to have a public launch early 2008." In the meantime, Google's vaunted partners are all off launching developer platforms on their own.

LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye, touring New York to brief journalists on embargoed news we already reported, told CNET that LinkedIn's backers have "great confidence in our independent path." CNET takes this for code that the rumored News Corp deal is off. Nah. It's just good negotiating. LinkedIn still may not sell, but if it does, Nye's billion-dollar posturing will ensure the site isn't sold cheap. It's a lesson some overeager startup flippers should take to heart.

News Corp. executive Jeremy Philips wants to get himself LinkedIn. But the business-oriented social network has just hired a fancypants new CEO, Dan Nye, who's told Fortune there's no way. No way, that is, unless Philips and his boss Rupert Murdoch pony up "a lot more" than a $1 billion. Ah, finally Nye is starting to understand the rhetorical game Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plays so well.

Jeremy Philips, the thirtysomething wunderkind of News Corp., is the reported "driving force" behind talks to acquire business networking site LinkedIn. Word is Philips wants to integrate the social network with News Corp.'s other new toy, the Wall Street Journal, in attempt to rejuvenate the paper's sagging classifieds revenues. Like the sound of that? Well good luck trying to contact Philips for some biz dev. The piker has all of 79 connections on LinkedIn. Newbie!

Let's all jump on the Murdoch's News Corp. is buying LinkedIn rumor treadmill. Following up last week's acquisition accusation by TechCrunch UK, VentureBeat says "a well-placed source has confirmed with us that these talks are serious." LinkedIn still has nothing to say. [VentureBeat]

I thought it would be cool to friend Wired editor Chris Anderson on Facebook, considering the number of love-bites we've given him lately. But if G. Christopher Anderson from Wired has an account, it's buried in the long tail of 500-plus loose matches. Great. Facebook won't let me search for "Chris Anderson Wired." It won't let me join the work group for Wired or the Times or any other pub I write for, because I don't have an email address at their domains. Has Facebook heard of freelancing? One of the costs it cuts is the IT overheard of maintaining email addresses for hundreds of part-time contributors. But hey, Facebook will let T-shirt sites be my friend. If anyone wants to make some professional contact and get some real work done, I'll be over at LinkedIn.

Rupert Murdoch, in the gluttonous spirit of Thanksgiving, is looking to acquire Linkedin. The business-focused networking site would match well with The Wall Street Journal and offer an online venue for classifieds ads. And it'd be a way for News Corp. to court those in the businessman demographic who aren't too keen on MySpace. Linkedin chairman Reid Hoffman responded to TechCrunch to say he's "entertained" by the rumors, but won't comment on their validity.

LinkedIn will launch a developer program similar to Facebook's platform on December 10. According to the company's PR firm, the new program will allow "select" third-party developers to build "business applications for the Web." We're just glad that In the details that follow, the words "social graph" are nowhere to be seen.

Quietly useful social network LinkedIn outgrew Facebook from October 2006 to October 2007, according to numbers from Nielsen/NetRatings. In that year, Facebook grew 125 percent to LinkedIn's 189 percent. Too bad LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye, who's been hinting at an eventual IPO, can't come close to matching Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Steve Jobs impersonations. Proclaiming your company will change media for the next 100 years will get you laughed at on Valleywag. Laughed at all the way to a $15 billion valuation.

Here's the real takeaway from Fortune's long-expected profile of the PayPal mafia: "Peter Thiel has a butler." The former PayPal CEO is living large in Pacific Heights. But he's hardly idle. With PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, masterminding a wide array of startups founded by some of his star hires at the payments company he sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. He's now on the board of Facebook, with a stake worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and stakes in Yelp, LinkedIn, Slide, and others besides. He may not quite be the capo di tutti capi imagined by Fortune's photo editors — who cleverly staged a Godfather-inspired shoot, above — but he's created a gang that can run free from the rules of the traditional VC game. Sand Hill Road hates him for it. I say, more power to him — and the rest of his mafiosi. (Photo of Thiel and Levchin by Robyn Twomey/Fortune; Godfather still from IMDB)

According to a source, blog-software company Six Apart has joined as another partner for Google's OpenSocial platform. For those of you keeping count at home, don't bother. The list is surely to grow as word gets out. Social network Friendster, for example, wasn't asked to join the Google Gang. The pioneering social network begged to be included after a story leaked on TechCrunch. Google's secrecy is making the whole "open" affair less than transparent, as different names leak to different reporters. Here's a list of media outlets and the OpenSocial partners they list.

Our charts may show that aggregated traffic of Google's OpenSocial gang might not quite stack up to Facebook's, but that doesn't mean the open platform isn't huge news for the smaller players Google rounded up. Here are screen shots detailing how one such partner, LinkedIn, plans to incorporate apps developed for the new platform.

I was a bit surprised when Surya Yalamanchili, the former reality-TV star fired by Donald Trump from The Apprentice, told me he'd landed at LinkedIn. One would think his broadcast-TV star turn would afford him more than enough introductions in the Valley. Perhaps he likes a challenge. Yalamanchili, who previously worked for Procter & Gamble and started this week as LinkedIn's director of marketing, has traded packaged goods for social networks. His first task: Figuring out how to brand LinkedIn as new and improved. Despite the differences between the two sites, people won't stop talking about how Facebook will soon move in on LinkedIn's turf.

Google couldn't get a piece of Facebook or its hot apps platform, so now it's building its own. Not that it would like people to call it Google's platform; it's trying to persuade people that this is an open platform. It's called OpenSocial, and it's supposed to force developers to reconsider writing apps solely in FBML, the Facebook platform's proprietary language. The idea is that Google will gather a gang of websites whose users combined, will offer an audience as large as Facebook's. It's a fine theory, but let's see the real numbers behind the Google Gang.

Dan Lyons, the Forbes editor behind the Fake Steve Jobs media empire, has written a new book. Or he might has well have. Have you seen the man's LinkedIn profile? For interests, Lyons lists: "Skiing, rowing, running, chasing my two-year-old twins around the house." He should have added: "going on and on." The monstrosity comes in at 2,000 words. His summary alone hits 121. We wanted Paul Boutin to write a 100-word version, but he's too busy writing his review of Options for the Wall Street Journal on his BlackBerry. So here's my mercifully brief version of Lyons's "Experience" and "Education" fields, which he could use to outline his memoir:

Do you ever stop and feel sad for Friendster? Me either, but if there was any room in your tiny, cynical hearts, you could. Yet another social network that's not the original is talking about taking big money moves. This time it's LinkedIn. CEO Dan Nye recently told Newsweek the company isn't interested in acquisition offers, but that an eventual IPO is likely. The only potential hitch, of course, is Facebook's newfound popularity among business professionals.