The topic of the night here in the US is a rumored deal in the works between Google and Twitter. Michael Arrington reported tonight that acquisition talks are in late stages, then revised his report with another source close to at least one company saying that the talks were in early stages.
Whatever stage these talks are in – some big issues are raised by the possibility of such a deal happening. We’ll be posting a ReadWriteWeb staff round table discussion on the topic in 7 or 8 hours, but we thought we’d ask our European readers, who are just starting a new day, for their thoughts in the meantime. We’d love to wake up to some fresh thinking on the topic.
RSS readers can click here to participate and see the results of the poll on this page. Some perspectives we’ve begun to consider so far are:
“Since adding the Twitter On Google Greasemonkey script, I click on Twitter links far more often than Google links. People are searching for what happened on American Idol last night, for what Obama just said, for that crazy video people are talking about. Those are all real-time searches that Twitter is well suited to serve. Calling Twitter a Google killer is not accurate but it is a new kind of search. But Google owns so much already! Couldn’t they just let me have this one thing that they didn’t own?”
–Sarah Perez, ReadWriteWeb
“It makes no sense to me. They have the smartest engineers in the world and could reproduce Twitter no problem. They could have integrated Jaiku into Android, Gmail and general presence info if they gave a crap about real time search.”
–Lidija Davis, ReadWriteWeb
“It’s a pure platform play. Google understands platforms and Twitter is a powerful platform. The network effects are already there and they’d be buying while there’s momentum.”
-John Musser, founder of API and Mashup directory and blog ProgrammableWeb
“I bet that Google won’t buy Twitter but instead will find a way to make an Adsense deal with them…Google doesn’t need Twitter for real-time search. They can set up a crawler for the RSS feed today for next to nothing.”
–Steve Rubel, Edelman Digital
My perspective (Marshall Kirkpatrick) is that this would be at least as big a tragedy as when Yahoo! bought and suffocated Delicious; I don’t know why Evan Williams would be willing to sell to Google.
What do you think? Could this be good? Will it be bad? How do you feel about it and what do you think it might mean?
You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner.
