Twitter about to be snatched up by Google?

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So, the big news right now is that Google is planning to put in an offer to buy Twitter.

TechCrunch seems to be the site that has broken the news:

“Here’s a heck of a rumor that we’ve sourced from two separate people close to the negotiations: Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. We don’t know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.”

It doesn’t appear to be a top topic on Twitter though (my main Twitter account has a ‘trending’ bar on my homepage now. In fact, the top trending topics right now are “G20” and “National Cleavage” (day) in South Africa, which is getting plenty of support).

It makes perfect sense for Google to buy Twitter as it would fit in nicely with their product suite. And they’ve got the money to burn and owners Evan Williams and Biz Stone have already sold Blogger to Google. So it’s a a done deal, right?

Well, perhaps not. Twitter has already resisted overtures from Facebook and has only just started to work out all the monetisation stuff, so may be holding out for a higher valuation. Personally, I think Twitter would work best with LinkedIn (don’t know who would buy who) as I think Twitter’s potential is greatest as a business networking tool.

Anecdotally, my media, PR, SEO and social networking contacts are still regular Twitter users, whereas I can see that interest is waning amongst my mates who signed up for celebrity following – Facebook offers consumer users a much richer overall experience.

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Tagged as: Biz Stone, Evan Williams, google, linkedin, TechCrunch, twitter