Sources: Google In Talks To Acquire Twitter

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/02/sources-google-in-late-stage-talks-to-buy-twitter/

by johns • 17 years ago

90 59 17 years ago

barredo• 17 years ago

Techcrunch gossip.

Arrignton adds in a comment:

> its well sourced, but who knows. Usually simply posting the rumor shakes a lot more information out of the tree. We’ll be updating.

Yeah. Sure.

brandnewlow2• 17 years ago

And when/if he's proven wrong? What real consequences will he face?

None.

JabavuAdams• 17 years ago

Meh. Start a site, like longbets, where you retroactively compare pundits' predictions with what actually happened.

_bn• 17 years ago

I find it funny how Arrington links to previous posts where he cites himself having some profound knowledge about the importance of a company or product.

Hey mike, you're a journalist, not a CEO. When it comes to business, you really don't know your head from your ass.

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

Ummm...actually, TechCrunch may have started as Mike posting stories in his underwear years ago, but it's a thriving startup in its own right today, between TC, Crunchbase, TC50, Crunchgear, etc, etc. I bet the whole mess is worth $50 - 100m.

mattmaroon3• 17 years ago

Define "worth" in that context. Do you really think someone would pay that much for it now?

palish2• 17 years ago

Would you say that in person? No? Then don't say it here.

By the way, I think Mike has posted here once or twice.

dawson• 17 years ago

What if he would say it in person? 'just saying! But, if he would, then he can say it here and did.

albertni• 17 years ago

"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."

Why am I not surprised. Translating the original article through the Techcrunch filter in my brain had already produced the mapping "late stage" -> "early stage or not at all".

rjurney• 17 years ago

If Google will make my entire twitstream searchable, then I am all for this even though I expect that Google will stagger Twitter's innovation.

I lose info I need in tweets, and it annoys me.

mattmaroon3• 17 years ago

"Real time search" is a great new buzzphrase, like "social graph", used to make a startup sound important rather than just popular and to therefore justify lofty valuations.

Any information worth having will still be worth having a half hour later when you can find it on real news outlets, professionally written and researched and with more than 140 characters.

This is all predicated on the ridiculous notion that "shit, a plane just crashed in the Hudson, that was freakin awesome" is news. If anything, that very event proved that people crave much more than headlines. They spent a few hours reading about it on Twitter and a few weeks watching about it on CNN.

bluelu• 17 years ago

As if the engineers at google were too stupid to implement real time search of a limited source set... :-)

If you search something that's not very common on twitter, the search will take forever (> 10 seconds to return results).

billydean• 17 years ago

Haha, man would Doug Bowman be pissed.

jcapote• 17 years ago

Haha, good one. (not being sarcastic, btw)

geuis2• 17 years ago

This is the worst thing that could happen to twitter. Google's brand doesn't have quite the same cachè it used to. Today, it means being bought with no improvements to the service for at least a year after that. Look at Grand Central and Jaiku as examples.

sam_in_nyc2• 17 years ago

They wouldn't have to brand it as Google. Think: Yahoo buying Flickr.

I also could imagine some pretty terrible things happening to Twitter... like, for example, the site displaying "FUCK OFF" on every page load, forever.

taciturn• 17 years ago

That certainly does seem unwise.

ahoyhere• 17 years ago

Yahoo! couldn't resist fucking with Flickr, though. Or delicious. Think about the damn tying it to freakin Yahoo! accounts, which look like they're out of the stone age, and the "you have to log in every 2 weeks to save a bookmark" feature they added to delicious, etc., etc. etc.

If people fuck with Twitter like that, it'll be gone. Service instability is one thing. Adding so much friction is another.

ojbyrne2• 17 years ago

Ok, spelling/grammar nazi time. The accent over cache would be only slightly pretentious if you didn't have it pointing the wrong way (caché is the slightly archaic spelling you're struggling to remember). But the fact that the word you're looking for is "cachet" makes it a double fail.

systemtrigger• 17 years ago

Who is being pretentious now?

geuis2• 17 years ago

So glad you could take the time to correct me. Just made my day. So yeah, I forgot "cachet" as an alternative spelling and was typing the comment from my phone. So you're the $10/hr Digg guy? Still sore about that?

sammcd• 17 years ago

For some reason, I just don't see this happening. If I just sold a company to google 5 years ago, why would I want to sell them another? I think it is much more likely they are collaborating on a project.

dwillett• 17 years ago

Twitter. The bane of my existence.

vaksel• 17 years ago

Not buying it. This is Google we are talking about, their main move has always been to release their own version of the service, hope to win, and only if that fails, do they open up their pocket book.

But a broken clock is still right twice a day, so who knows, maybe Arrington's source isn't full of it

eirikref• 17 years ago

I'm not quite sure I agree. If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google, you will see that they have often bought companies as well.

In some cases you might argue that they have bought less known companies, refactored and rebranded the service, and then used it to go after the marked share of a more known service.

vang3lis• 17 years ago

> This is Google we are talking about, their main move has always been to release their own version of the service, hope to win, and only if that fails, do they open up their pocket book.

But it failed! See what happened to Jaiku

jalammar• 17 years ago

Jaiku was also bought, not developed in-house.

siculars• 17 years ago

i would wager that google is not buying the service , rather the community. many twitter clones exist but the community is with the original - and that is what is valuable, the data they produce.

shafqat• 17 years ago

There is no way Twitter is going to sell itself for under 1B. They already raised at a 250M valuation, and with the team of investors they have behind them, there will be a lot of pressure to hold out until 1B or somewhere close to that.

medianama• 17 years ago

Google is best poised to monetize twitter.. $250mn seems low though.

axod• 17 years ago

Come on now, we all know TechCrunch is ridiculously pro-twitter. I doubt there's too much in this TBH.

adamhowell• 17 years ago

I'm surprised no one's mentioned the fact that, most likely, Evan Williams has no desire to go back to Google.

10ren• 17 years ago

Today I saw a sign outside a shop, saying "follow us on twitter". I didn't realize how mainstream twitter has already become.

dejb• 17 years ago

I can see a thread folding algorithm needing to be developed.

ComputerGuru• 17 years ago

No. Please no.

antidaily• 17 years ago

Makes sense: twitter is a great awesome search tool. For instance, I find myself searching "media temple" when my server is crawling just to see if anyone else is experiencing the same issues.

palehose• 17 years ago

I wonder if Twitter would have to re-write all their Ruby on Rails code into Java since Ruby is not a supported language at Google.

Sources: Google In Talks To Acquire Twitter

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