For Google to buy Twitter would be a reversal of a very entrenched strategy that can be summed up as "No niches!". That's why they scrapped Google Reader. There are very few exceptions to this strategy (Google apps for work and some cloud offerings)
Twitter is not for everybody and never will be. Twitter is for those who publish information and for those who are interested in shaping their own information consumption beyond the daily headlines plus family and friends spam.
If Google buys Twitter in the hope of creating a realtime Google for everybody they will fail.
I hope they decide to reverse their "no niches" strategy, because that strategy has been very damaging indeed.
Twitter is not as big as Facebook, but it is not a niche service in the sense that Reader was. Twitter has 300M worldwide users and can count as users most global celebrities, politicians, artists, and journalists. People that make news. Reader is not a good comparison at all.
Whether you define a niche as 0.5% of the population or as 5% of the population is not important. Google doesn't do 0.5% and it doesn't do 5%. It only does stuff that is potentially useful for almost everybody (with a few exceptions that are targeted at IT professionals).
I don't know exactly what the potential of Reader might have been. Maybe something between 1% and 3%? It's the same ballpark as Twitter in my view, but that is admittedly rather speculative. It's also not the point I was trying to make.
A product whose primary appeal is to people who make and consume news is, ultimately, a niche product. The majority of people who Twitter might ever reach have seen it and realized it's not for them.
Twitter could absolutely be a valuable property, but it's never going to have the scale/reach of Google Search or Facebook.
Twitter is not for everybody and never will be. Twitter is for those who publish information and for those who are interested in shaping their own information consumption beyond the daily headlines plus family and friends spam.
If Google buys Twitter in the hope of creating a realtime Google for everybody they will fail.
I hope they decide to reverse their "no niches" strategy, because that strategy has been very damaging indeed.