Facebook Nearly Added Twitter To Friends List

nandemoari writes "It seems the world's most popular social networking site was just moments away from acquiring another — and few of us ever knew about it. A Facebook executive has revealed that a planned takeover of Twitter only fell apart because of a disagreement over stock valuations. Despite the rather miserable economy, Facebook is still looking to buy out other firms and says it could make a billion dollars a year from advertising. Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who put up some of the money behind Facebook, discussed the deal in a Business Week interview. Thiel says the two sides agreed a $500 million purchase price and that Twitter would receive the payment in Facebook stock rather than cash — which is a common solution in large takeovers where there simply isn't the money available for a buyout."

Comments

Facebook are a bit too much talk, not enough walk.

[onion2k]

Facebook [...] says it could make a billion dollars a year from advertising

Go on then.

I could say I can make eleventy dollars a furlong from my blog; that doesn't make it true. Only a dribbling moron would base a business decision (such as exchanging their website for stock) on such a claim.

Re:Facebook are a bit too much talk, not enough wa

[drinkypoo]

Twitter and the twits that use it can be used to do incredibly powerful data mining and forecasting. If you just analyze the twits coming in (I like to refer both to users and their messages by this term, it is slightly confusing but makes sense in its own way - and often, the difference is unimportant) then you can find out all kinds of things, like (to borrow from your example) where in a city it is raining, or where automobile accidents have occurred, or where the police are beating someone to death, or where the police are being beaten to death, or whatever the fuck is going on! Forget predicting flu outbreak with google, that is way too slow and has far too little resolution. :)