• TechCrunch, Friday, April 3, 2009 11:31 AM

Last night, TechCrunch, citing "two separate people close to the negotiations," claimed that Google was in the late stages of acquiring Twitter for an undisclosed price. Later, the tech blog updated its claim with another source who said the acquisition discussions were still in the fairly early stages, and that the two companies were also considering working together on a real-time search engine.

You can assume that any Google offer would be considerably higher than the $250 million valuation that Twitter saw in its most recent round of funding. Facebook obviously tried to buy the microblogging sensation for $500 million late last year, but most of that was based on overvalued Facebook stock. If the rumors are true, Google is probably looking at a cash/stock deal.

Why would the search giant want to buy Twitter? A number of reasons, says Michael Arrington. "We've 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." This would be the second sale to Google for Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone; they sold blogger to the search giant five years ago. Arrington says this would be a "brilliant deal" for Google, because the value of Twitter is only going to go up over time.

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