New sources corroborate last Friday's report in TechCrunch that Google is in talks to buy Twitter. However, according to these sources, Google's internal valuation of the microblogging service is at
"a token premium" above its last round of financing, or around $250 million. Some employees desperately want a deal, but the TechCrunch sources said that Twitter CEO Evan Williams wouldn't even sell
for $1 billion. "He may blink but he wouldn't do it," said one source. Of course, the other problem is that Twitter might be viewed as a search-related acquisition, inviting more antitrust scrutiny
for Google.
Clearly, talks are happening, but Twitter maintains, as any company would in such circumstances, that it has no intention of selling. In a blog post, co-founder Biz Stone wrote,
"Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we're just getting started." Whether or not Google would pay more than $1 billion for Twitter remains an open question, but Michael
Arrington notes that "there's no way Microsoft lets a deal be negotiated without putting its bid in, too. And if these two giants see Twitter as the future of search, $1 billion is peanuts."
The other possible outcome is some kind of partnership between Google and Twitter. According to Arrington, Google wants a real time feed of Twitter updates to speed up its indexing process. Currently,
the search giant is indexing Twitter feeds at a "dreadfully slow" rate. "A real time feed would be of huge value to Google, and they'd be smart to nail down a long term deal sooner rather than later,"
he says.
Read the whole story at TechCrunch »