Are there any companies left in Silicon Valley that bloggers haven’t suggested as potential buyers of Twitter?
Since Facebook approached Twitter last November, Google and Microsoft have both been linked with the rapidly growing (and manically hyped) microblogging service.
Now both Valleywag and TechCrunch are reporting that Apple has been in discussions with Twitter about a supposed $700m deal. Apple published a glowing profile of Twitter on its customer case-study pages last week, no doubt fuelling such speculation.
Since November, Twitter’s body language has consistently been that it wants to remain independent. Even so, an Apple deal doesn’t immediately seem logical.
The iPhone’s App Store might be doing a roaring trade by selling software for updating Twitter from the mobile, but it can continue to do so without buying Twitter itself.
But that isn’t the main barrier to a deal, which is more cultural.
For the most part, Apple hasn’t been very interested in web services. It still has some lost face to make up after the botched launch of MobileMe, which syncs contacts and other details from desktop and iPhone to the cloud. And Apple is also keen to push Safari in the increasingly competitive web-browser market. But Twitter isn’t an easy fit into either service.
As the App Store demonstrates (Apple approves everything that’s developed for the iPhone), Apple’s always been more interested in closed, proprietary systems that it can lock down and control than Twitter’s open-to-all-comers network of third-party apps and sites. Even Valleywag – whose editor, it should be noted, is soon to depart the blog – acknowledges that Apple’s secretive ethos is not well aligned with web developers’ culture of openness.
A significant portion of Twitter’s traffic comes via desktop software and other services making use of Twitter’s API. Mr Stone said last November that Twitter gets 20 times as much traffic through its API than to Twitter.com itself. Apple’s proprietary approach could jar with Twitter’s ecosystem, which actually has more in common with Microsoft’s vast network of partners and service providers.
As such, a Microsoft deal could make more sense than Google, if Twitter and its investors ever agreed to it. Google bought but is now closing Jaiku, a similar microblogging service, in 2007.
On recent form, perhaps Oracle is next to be touted as a potential buyer of Twitter?
