
Why Twitter Turned Down Facebook  - makimaki
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/why-twitter-turned-down-facebook/
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swilliams
To boil it down, a generic answer: "The timing wasn't right."

I still think it was a very prudent decision. Gruber said it best: "I’m not
sure I’d sell a sandwich in exchange for Facebook stock."
(<http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/24/twitter-facebook>)

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michael_dorfman
Yeah, but with no business model to speak of, Twitter has yet to prove they
are worth as much as a sandwich.

~~~
swilliams
True, but Twitter isn't even trying yet. I think it would be easier to
generate revenue with it than Facebook. I'd rather be in Twitter's position
than Facebook's.

~~~
mattmaroon
I don't know, at least as far as profits go. They've got significant SMS
expenses to overcome. Facebook's per user cost of delivering service has to be
much cheaper.

I think Facebook has a pretty solid path to revenue (re-legitimize apps and
they provide a dead simple payments platform) though they don't seem like
they're going to take it.

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mattmaroon
For those not in the Valley "it wasn’t the right time" == "they didn't offer
enough cash".

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tlrobinson
$500 million is a hell of a lot for something like Twitter, even if it is
stock, not cash.

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whatusername
But it was $500 mill giving FB a $15B valuation.. If you assume FB is worth
$3B - then it was only a $100 mil offer. (Still nothing to be sneezed at)

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tlrobinson
$100 million seems like a more fair valuation of Twitter to me. I feel like
people around here ("here" meaning Silicon Valley, etc) overvalue Twitter.

~~~
mattmaroon
$100 million in cash maybe, though that would allegedly be about their
valuation as of last funding round.

$100m in Facebook stock I'd turn down too, if I were them.

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flashgordon
I think in this case twitter has a lot more leverage here. THey have a lot of
traction, great reputation (especially after "fixing" their scalability
issues) and no competitors (not talking about friendfeed yet). So they can
afford to hold out to sweeten the deal a bit more.

~~~
trezor
I'll just refer to my previous comment about twitter.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=378541>

Outside hacker news and "Valley-oriented" news-sites I've hardly heard it
mentioned.

Twitter may have potential, but it still has massive usability problems, and
at large is one of the few services I've signed up for which has offered me
absolutely nothing of value and no way to improve on that.

Saying twitter, a _bandwidth hole_ with no actual plan to monetize on its
service, is worth millions is clearly overstating its value, even with its
current user-base.

~~~
paulsilver
It was mentioned on the front page of The Guardian (national UK newspaper) of
Nov 29th, here's the article:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/29/mumbai-terror-
at...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/29/mumbai-terror-attacks-
terrorism1)

It is no where near as mainstream as Facebook, but it is starting to be
mentioned in mainstream places, not just in the technology sections.

To be honest, I'm not sure Twitter will go mainstream like Facebook has. Most
of the value I get from it is to be in touch with friends throughout the day.
Not a lot of workplaces will let you do that (mine does, but that's a benefit
to being self employed :-) ) From what I see, Facebook is more oriented around
much more asynchronous usage, which is a lot easier for most people to use.

