Michael Arrington and his Techcrunch blog appear to be a few characters short of 140 with their report of rumours that Google is in late-stage talks to buy microblogging service Twitter.
A source close to Twitter told us today the “story is fiction”, there were no talks with Google on any possible acquisition.
In a blog note, Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder, said:
“It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects.
Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we’re just getting started.”
Note the use of the adjective “independent” and the fact that he does not rule out talks of any kind with Google.
In fact, Google is very likely to talk to Twitter about the developing trend of the real-time Web. Searching Twitter can provide more up-to-the-minute results than Google can offer. It would be natural for Google to seek some kind of partnership where it could help Twitter monetise this trend or develop its own search version by “crawling” Twitter’s conversations.
Google has not covered itself in glory in this area to date. It acquired Twitter-like services Dodgeball and Jaiku, but did nothing with them – Dodgeball has now been closed and Jaiku released to the open source community.
Twitter does seem to be at the same stage of development as YouTube, when Google realised video was the next big thing and paid $1.65bn for it. It would also benefit like YouTube from the solid infrastructure Google can provide to maintain its rapid growth.
However, Twitter’s service has become more reliable in recent months and its founders seem set on maintaining their independence in the near term. They raised a further $35m in funding in February, from Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.
Twitter is on its way to becoming as big a Bay Area name around the world as Facebook and Google, and who can put a price on that?
