According to sources quoted in a The Wall Street Journal story published late Wednesday night, Twitter has been having what the paper called “low-level” discussions about a possible acquisition by either Google or Facebook, at a valuation of $8 billion to $10 billion. Obviously the company’s financial backers—which include VC firms such as Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers—are looking forward to a potential exit and a hefty return on their investment. And both Google and Facebook could probably make use of Twitter in some form or other. But would an acquisition by either Web giant be good for the messaging service, or its users?
What do you guys think about this? Do you think Twitter would be better off with Google, standing alone, or selling to Facebook?
Twitter will grow best as the service we know on it’s own or with an owner who does not have a need to morph the product into their existing services. However there are many benefits by integrating… and may downsides.
One can see how a search provider would benefit them (and themselves) by showing updates in results better and posting back to results.
On the other hand facebook brings a huge community but also the risk of turning a tool that people may use for one purpose into a part of a profile where it doesn’t fit (groups & uses).
Selling and taking the cash is very different than developing down the road, or even developing revenue. They all can support each other and conflict depending on the play.
Twitter is doing fine on its own. I’m not sure why Facebook would be interested. Google is probably trying to buy out the competition since their own equivalent (Buzz) failed so miserably. That’s what happened with Google Videos - it didn’t do as well as they had hoped, so they just bought YouTube instead.
Its doing fine? Have you seen all the whail errors lately? I know personally I have to use Tweetdeck to access Twitter because the main domain always acts up.
I think twitter as alone doing a very good and fair bit of job. I don’t think twitter should not join face book. But twitter can integrate with google if they want to.
Ya, but sometimes small companies need to be bought out by bigger ones in order to have further growth and development. Why do you think Youtube sold to Google?