This is not 100%, but it is being reported by two particular sources, whom I find to be overall thorough in their reporting, WashingtonPost.com and LALate.com. The gossip is that after (wisely) turning down an initial offer of half a billion dollars from Facebook, Twitter may be considering a new bid from Google.
All of the reports on this made my head hurt. The world would have become dark/ day turned to night and whatnot, if Facebook had successfully bought and inevitably ruined my favourite social network. They would have swallowed it whole, burped and then pooped it out, suddenly with lots of removed features and reduced usability.
Google could be a FAR superior offer. They managed to not totally fuck up YouTube when they bought that. I trust Twitter in their hands far more than anyone else.
Today’s deliciously well-articulated conjecture on the subject is thus, from The Washington Post (via LA Late):
Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. We don’t know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.
If this is accurate, it’s a brilliant deal for Google – the value of Twitter is only going to go up over time. And it will be Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s second sale to Google – they sold Blogger to them just five years ago. But there’s one big question – where’s Microsoft in all this? Letting Twitter go to Google only hurts them, badly, in the long term search game. This is an asset they need to be competing for aggressively.
Of course, it’ll be sad to see Twitter become just another subsidiary of Google, if this happens. I would have liked to have seen the company spread its wings a little longer to see what it could do. My expert and completely un-asked for opinion is that this would be a good move. After All, if Twitter had more funding, then perhaps they could operate at capacity and not have so many damn load errors and ‘Over Capacity’ warnings!
Twitter’s going to turn into one big fucking advertisement. Tragical.
At least we can say that we were there during its hayday
For us old-timers, there will be a backlash, and people will actually laugh as they purchase “natural lettuce” over the salad bar at the grocery store.
You guys are bummed and/of excited over corporate take over?
Did you know that ever single “Natural – No Animal Testing” – oh gosh say……. Burt’s Bees – has been bought by CLOROX????
There are the big Four – and if you decide to dig into them, god help you.
Kelly Mahan Jaramillo – one tired pissed off pup.
Hey hey, yes, us whipper-snappers are chomping at the bit!
For functionality reasons only though. Twitter breaks easily. Maybe with a better infrastructure and funding that would not happen.
Lastly, what is this strange lettuce thing of which you speak?
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