Fritz Lanman, Microsoft's senior director of corporate strategy and acquisitions, has confirmed today that the company unsuccessfully bid $15 billion for social networking giant Facebook in 2007, being rejected outright.

After being turned down, Microsoft instead purchased a small stake in the company for $240 million.

Added Lanman (via CW): "Yeah, we tried to acquire Facebook. Facebook had a lot of similarities to Microsoft back in the day."

The exec says he believes the company will one day be worth as much as Microsoft. Microsoft currently has a market cap of $233 billion, second only to Apple in the technology sector.

Facebook currently has an estimated value of $41 billion.

Both companies currently work together, with Facebook's search being powered by Microsoft's Bing search engine.

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has finally voted to move ahead with a contract with ICM Registry that would create domains with a .xxx address, to be used by pornographic sites.

While closer to being a reality than before, there are still concerns from some government officials about the suffix that will be dedicated solely to adult sites.

ICM's CEO Stuart Lawley says the new suffix will fully benefit adult content sites by making it easier for would-be customers to find them.

.xxx domains, however, will be voluntary and it is unclear how many popular adult sites will actually give up their .com addresses and move.

ICM says there are already 189,000 "pre-registrations" for .xxx sites, with another 300,000 expected to launch next year.

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According to the latest NPD figures, the Microsoft Xbox 360 led the way again for the month of November, beating out rivals Wii and PS3 in hardware sales.

The Xbox 360 has now led sales in the States for six straight months.

Microsoft saw 1.37 million Xbox units sold for the month, up 68 percent year-over-year, followed closely behind by the Nintendo Wii at 1.27 million units, up .8 from last year.

Sony saw their year-over-year PlayStation 3 sales fall by 25 percent to 530,000. Sony slashed prices of their console last November.

Overall, sales of hardware, software and accessories jumped 8 percent, the first rise in the industry since May.

Year-to-date revenue now stands at $14.73 billion, down 5 percent YoY.

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Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter, one of the most well-known in the video game industry has said today that Microsoft's Kinect is crushing Sony's rival Move motion control system in regards to sales.

Sony says it has shipped 4.1 million units since launch, but it is unclear how many of those have translated to actual retail sales.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has confirmed 2.5 million sales in just under a month.

Pachter added:

"About one fifth of PS3 sales included bundles with Sony's Move controller, suggesting a modest third month. About half of Xbox 360 sales included bundles with Microsoft's Kinect peripheral, suggesting a strong first month. Xbox 360 Kinect console bundles outsold PS3 Move console bundles by more than 5:1."

The analyst also noted that he expects overall installed base for Move and Kinect to be 8 million by the end of the year and 25 million by the end of 2011.

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