TechCrunch is reporting a rather vague rumor claiming that some company large enough to spend $1 billion to $1.5 billion is about to spend that much to buy some other company in the social space. Using the powers of deductive reasoning, TechCrunch has come up with either Google or MySpace buying social networking site Bebo.

Rumors of Yahoo buying Bebo came up last May for a cool billion dollars, those rumors seemingly turned out to be false as nothing came of them. Still it’s somewhat interesting that Yahoo paying a billion for Bebo 9 months ago was considered a somewhat credible rumor and apparently the price tag has changed much since then. Compare this to Yahoo trying to buy Facebook for a billion dollars in late 2006 and them eventually selling a stake to Microsoft a few months ago for an amount that pegged their value at $15 billion dollars.

Of course this latest rumor could be way off as well, though Bebo did recently hire a bank to either look into selling (they claimed no) or raising more money.

More interesting I think is the prospect of Google being involved in some kind of billion dollar-plus purchase so soon after Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo. Certainly a purchase of Bebo wouldn’t make nearly the headlines of a Microsoft/Yahoo deal, so perhaps that is way off. Instead, maybe they are involved in a multi-billion dollar deal of some sort in order to help bail Yahoo out of accepting Microsoft’s deal.

Sure it’s pure speculation, but it’s pretty clear that Yahoo is looking for anyway out and Google wants to help them but can’t directly.