Mike Arrington posts on a rumor that google in talsk again to acquire twitter.
Here’s a heck of a rumor that we’ve sourced from two separate people close to the negotiations: 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 Goolge - 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.
Updated: Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine.
A deal with google may be great for its founders, but as a user I hope this rumor is not true. I would like tos see twitter innovate as an independent company as I think it has a lot of potential. As part of google, the innovation at twitter will stagnate.
It’s about time. I have said in my previous comments here and elsewhere that it’s just a matter of time before Google attempts to buy Twitter. But yes, you are right - it’s a bit late in the game for them, especially with the value of Twitter going through the roof. I am sure they will pay much more this time. Who knows - this could be a sale that will be more than YouTube.com. Who knows? Depends on whether the Twitter boys are desperate for money or not.
Comment by Prostate Cancer — April 3, 2009 @ 1:02 am