Speaking of all this social networking, where is MySpace in all this? Well, it turns out News Corps' teen locker door is making sweet, sweet music. MySpace Music, a joint venture in which music labels have an equity stake launched last fall, rolled out a snazzy more user-friendly homepage and overall design, though there are no functions incorporating recent acquisition iLike into the mix just yet. At the moment, the move is likely intended to further distinguish the music spin-off from its parent and let people know its there, says TechCrunch.

Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, an open source provider of CAPTCHA's, or security questions that deter spam by requiring one to decipher jumbled words before, say, commenting on a blog post. Google says the company's technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text -- known as Optical Character Recognition. Such technology might come in handy for, say, scanning entire libraries of books, or the archives of publishers.

Following a famine of activity, it looks like the mergers and acquisition market is showing signs of life. Recently announced deals are weightier than in the last year or so, and -- along with bargain prices -- will likely inspire many more deals over the next year. GigaOm plays fortuneteller, predicting ten tie-ups -- eBay swallowing Etsy; Yahoo buying Hulu -- that might sound unlikely if the worlds of M&A and technology weren't so unpredictable.

If you were dying to know more about Google's problematic bid to buy video compression firm On2, an SEC filing provides new details. For one, while On2's board considered reaching out to other buyers, they were apparently concerned that interested parties might share customers with On2 who might "react negatively" if they learned that On2 was for sale. That led the company's management to negotiate exclusively with Google for a fixed period.

Worldwide, Facebook's community crossed the 300 million member threshold this week, and said it's becoming "cash-flow positive" -- two milestones analysts and bloggers are taking as opportunities to sound off on what is clearly an unprecedented social phenomenon (and likely a good business investment). "With financial stability pretty much secured it may have a shot at becoming the largest social platform in history, maybe even breaking the mythical 1 billion users mark," writes Softpedia. However, notes The Tech Beat: "This doesn't mean the social network is a profitable operation yet ... Rather, the cash it generates …

Say goodbye to the dancing monkey. Ross Levinsohn, Jim Heckman, and Michael Barrett -- all former Fox Interactive Media execs -- have launched a startup that lets publishers remove unwanted ads from their sites with a system that allows them to "shop" for ads from an iTunes-like online store. Named 5to1 -- for the Doors song "5 to 1," whose lyrics incite rebellion: "They got the guns, but we got the numbers. Gonna win yeah, we're taking over" -- it's already raised about $5.5 million, and is being positioned as an antidote to remnant ad networks, whose ads arguably detract …

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown welcomed the creator of the World Wide Web to 10 Downing Street on Tuesday morning. No, not Al Gore. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, along with Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Southampton, Nigel, both of whom have been asked to help Brown achieve his stated goal of harnessing the Web to make Government more accessible to the public. Similar to the one introduced by the Obama administration, Berners-Lee apparently envisions a single online access point to Government information.

What happens when you introduce voice chatting to Facebook's massive and engaged community? Well, we're about to find out now that technology company Vivox has created a voice chat system for the social networking service. Apparently dreamed up by members of the company's Vivox Labs unit, the new application lets people who are Facebook friends engage quite simply in voice chat any time they please. Founded in 2005, Vivox has already built a solid business as a voice chat system for about 15 million PC gamers.

Read the The Wall Street Journal on your iPhone or Blackberry? Yeah, Rupert Murdoch is ready to start charging you for that. While he didn't offer a specific time line, the News Corp. head told attendees at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia XVIII Conference to expect to start paying in the next few months. More surprising, Hulu -- originally a joint venture between News Corp. and NBCU -- will eventually require viewers to pay a fee. We know Murdoch promised to start charging for all content under his control, but Hulu was developed and marketed to users as a free service. …

Forget about Monster. A full 28.5% of LinkedIn's users are looking for a job, according to new comScore data. Comscore was able to estimate of how many of LinkedIn's visitors are job seekers -- and even to what degree those visitors are looking for a job -- by cross-referencing visits to job-seeking sites with visits to LinkedIn. According to that data, the average LinkedIn user is 2.4 times as likely as the average Internet user to be looking for a job. Overall, LinkedIn had 8 million US visitors in July -- an increase of 66% compared to a year ago.