There’s a big rumour doing the rounds at the moment that Google are on the verge of securing a deal to acquire the Internet’s new golden child, Twitter.
The price hasn’t been confirmed but one can only assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.

Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based partially on overvalued Facebook stock. Google would be paying in cash and/or publicly valued stock, which is equivalent to cash. So whatever the final acquisition value might be, it can’t be compared apples-to-apples with the Facebook deal.

So why would Google want Twitter? Industry experts have been arguing for some time that Twitter’s real value is in search. It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn’t even have a horse in the game.

If the rumours prove to be accurate, then it would be 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 if they have any hope of playing more than a bit part in the future battle for search supremacy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.