Google ‘in late-stage negotiations’ to buy social networking site Twitter
The internet was abuzz with tweets, blog posts and instant messages yesterday as rumours spread that Google and Twitter, two of the web’s biggest names, were close to completing a multimillion-dollar deal.
Michael Arrington, the author of the influential technology blog TechCrunch, claimed to have spoken to two close sources and said they suggested that negotiations were in the late stages. He believed that Google would have to pay well above the $250 million (£170 million) that Twitter was recently valued at by financial investors.
Twitter, the social networking and “microblogging” site, is one of the hottest properties on the web. It has almost 10 million users, who post short updates – “tweets” of up to 140 characters via the website or a mobile phone. More than 3.5 million people signed up in the first two months of this year alone, according to the internet market specialist comScore.
Celebrities such as Stephen Fry, Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross are avid users. Barack Obama used the site as a tool during last year’s presidential elections to talk quickly and directly to hundreds of thousands of followers.
It has broken major news stories, giving the first witness reports from the Mumbai terrorist attacks and American plane crashes in Denver and in the Hudson River in New York.
Twitter has long been admired by other big technology companies. Its founders, Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey, were involved in negotiations to sell it to Facebook, the social-networking site that was considered the internet’s “new big thing” before Twitter came along. The deal broke down, with Peter Thiel, an executive involved in the negotiations, hinting that an asking price of around $500 million was too steep.
Mr Williams and Mr Stone sold their start-up, Blogger, to Google five years ago. A Google spokesman said that the company “would not comment on rumour and speculation” about any new deal. Mr Stone wrote on his blog: “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.”
Twitter could help Google to become more responsive, giving an insight into what the world is talking about at any given moment. Despite Twitter’s popularity, its founders have struggled to reap significant revenues. Jeff Mann, vice-president of the technology analyst Gartner research, said: “The culture and ambitions of Twitter and Google match. Now is the time for Twitter to sell.”
Source: Internet
