

Sources: Google In Talks To Acquire Twitter  - johns
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/02/sources-google-in-late-stage-talks-to-buy-twitter/

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barredo
Techcrunch gossip.

Arrignton adds in a comment:

> _its well sourced, but who knows. Usually simply posting the rumor shakes a
> lot more information out of the tree. We’ll be updating._

Yeah. Sure.

~~~
brandnewlow
And when/if he's proven wrong? What real consequences will he face?

None.

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JabavuAdams
Meh. Start a site, like longbets, where you retroactively compare pundits'
predictions with what actually happened.

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jonknee
One of those just started:

<http://wrongtomorrow.com/>

I should start adding Mike Arrington quotes, he's almost as bad as Scoble.

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yan
_exactly_ the idea I had for a site.

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Splines
Hah - I had a similar idea, except it wasn't pundits that you measured, it was
regular people. You could make predictions, for the future, and people could
vote up the "truthfulness" of them as time went by. You'd need some sort of
penalty to discourage people from predicting everything under the sun though.

Of course, ideas are cheap...

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yan
Yeah, I just wanted to create a site where people can submit articles, blog
posts or just any predictions about the future and a maturity date. At the
maturity date, you can mark it correct or incorrect.

Only then can you sort out intelligent predictions from noise.

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jodrellblank
See Derren Brown's "The System". You wouldn't sort out intelligent predictions
from noise, you'd sort out (intelligent and/or lucky) predictions from noise.
Which still wouldn't give you any idea which future predictions to trust.

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Zaak
Discount the value of a correct prediction by how many predictions were made
by that person. You'd need some way to prevent making a lot of sock puppet
accounts, but that's probably doable.

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mattmaroon
"Real time search" is a great new buzzphrase, like "social graph", used to
make a startup sound important rather than just popular and to therefore
justify lofty valuations.

Any information worth having will still be worth having a half hour later when
you can find it on real news outlets, professionally written and researched
and with more than 140 characters.

This is all predicated on the ridiculous notion that "shit, a plane just
crashed in the Hudson, that was freakin awesome" is news. If anything, that
very event proved that people crave much more than headlines. They spent a few
hours reading about it on Twitter and a few weeks watching about it on CNN.

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bluelu
As if the engineers at google were too stupid to implement real time search of
a limited source set... :-)

If you search something that's not very common on twitter, the search will
take forever (> 10 seconds to return results).

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albertni
_"Updated: Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still
fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working
together on a Google real time search engine."_

Why am I not surprised. Translating the original article through the
Techcrunch filter in my brain had already produced the mapping "late stage" ->
"early stage or not at all".

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shafqat
There is no way Twitter is going to sell itself for under 1B. They already
raised at a 250M valuation, and with the team of investors they have behind
them, there will be a lot of pressure to hold out until 1B or somewhere close
to that.

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billydean
Haha, man would Doug Bowman be pissed.

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jcapote
Haha, good one. (not being sarcastic, btw)

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adamhowell
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the fact that, most likely, Evan Williams has
no desire to go back to Google.

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vaksel
Not buying it. This is Google we are talking about, their main move has always
been to release their own version of the service, hope to win, and only if
that fails, do they open up their pocket book.

But a broken clock is still right twice a day, so who knows, maybe Arrington's
source isn't full of it

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vang3lis
> This is Google we are talking about, their main move has always been to
> release their own version of the service, hope to win, and only if that
> fails, do they open up their pocket book.

But it failed! See what happened to Jaiku

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jalammar
Jaiku was also bought, not developed in-house.

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antidaily
Makes sense: twitter is a great awesome search tool. For instance, I find
myself searching "media temple" when my server is crawling just to see if
anyone else is experiencing the same issues.

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axod
Come on now, we all know TechCrunch is ridiculously pro-twitter. I doubt
there's too much in this TBH.

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sammcd
For some reason, I just don't see this happening. If I just sold a company to
google 5 years ago, why would I want to sell them another? I think it is much
more likely they are collaborating on a project.

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rjurney
If Google will make my entire twitstream searchable, then I am all for this
even though I expect that Google will stagger Twitter's innovation.

I lose info I need in tweets, and it annoys me.

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dejb
I can see a thread folding algorithm needing to be developed.

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ComputerGuru
No. Please no.

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palehose
I wonder if Twitter would have to re-write all their Ruby on Rails code into
Java since Ruby is not a supported language at Google.

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geuis
This is the worst thing that could happen to twitter. Google's brand doesn't
have quite the same cachè it used to. Today, it means being bought with no
improvements to the service for at least a year after that. Look at Grand
Central and Jaiku as examples.

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ojbyrne
Ok, spelling/grammar nazi time. The accent over cache would be only slightly
pretentious if you didn't have it pointing the wrong way (caché is the
slightly archaic spelling you're struggling to remember). But the fact that
the word you're looking for is "cachet" makes it a double fail.

~~~
systemtrigger
Who is being pretentious now?

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ojbyrne
I don't see how pointing out poor english is pretentious. Especially when it's
not a case of someone speaking it as their second language, but someone trying
to put on airs and getting it wrong.

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10ren
Today I saw a sign outside a shop, saying "follow us on twitter". I didn't
realize how mainstream twitter has already become.

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dwillett
Twitter. The bane of my existence.

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medianama
Google is best poised to monetize twitter.. $250mn seems low though.

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_bn
I find it funny how Arrington links to previous posts where he cites himself
having some profound knowledge about the importance of a company or product.

Hey mike, you're a journalist, not a CEO. When it comes to business, you
really don't know your head from your ass.

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ryanwaggoner
Ummm...actually, TechCrunch may have started as Mike posting stories in his
underwear years ago, but it's a thriving startup in its own right today,
between TC, Crunchbase, TC50, Crunchgear, etc, etc. I bet the whole mess is
worth $50 - 100m.

~~~
mattmaroon
Define "worth" in that context. Do you really think someone would pay that
much for it now?

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mattmaroon
Btw, for comparison, HuffPo raised at a $75m pre-money valuation (announced
Dec 1 but negotiated and finalized possibly before the economy went haywaire)
and they have about 4x the traffic of TechCrunch.

[http://siteanalytics.compete.com/huffingtonpost.com+techcrun...](http://siteanalytics.compete.com/huffingtonpost.com+techcrunch.com/?metric=uv)

I feel like you're an order of magnitude off there.

