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Apple Rumored To Want To Buy Twitter
OSXGlitch writes "A post on TechCrunch this morning extends the rumor that Apple wants to buy Twitter with part of their massive cash reserve (estimated at nearly $29B). The Twitterverse is alive with speculation that the price being discussed is $700 million. This goes against reports that Twitter's founders aren't interested in selling, and that they estimate the value of the company at around $250 million. Two questions: How do we all feel about the possibility of Apple owning Twitter? And, can Twitter decline an offer that is nearly three times their estimated worth?"
This Guardian article argues that the story is complete hot air, the two sources (Tech Crunch and ValleyWag) are both unconvinced themselves and the Twitter execs seem to be in the wrong part of the US to be locked into negotiations with Apple.
Leaving aside whether it is true or not, it seems a very strange fit. Apple doesn't seem to gain very much in its core business from the acquisition
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
1) Launch free web service
2) ???
3) Profit
Can someone remind me how Twitter makes money. Or, at least how to justify a $700 million valuation?
Find out interesting keywords in what people say they are doing or talking about.
Advertise something local and highly related to that person, in the form of a discount offer or something.
Google ads for the attention-span-of-a-gnat generation?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Twitter is the most useless waste of time and human resource.
I don't use it myself, but I've seen it come in handy on a number of occasions. I was at WWDC last year, and I went to a bar with a couple of friends. One of them posted where we were, and twenty minutes later we had a party with about a hundred people in attendance. Rather more convenient than looking up a bunch of people and calling them.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Hopefully, the cycle of companies with large expenses and no profits being purchased by the stupid will come to an end. We all know how profitable Skype has been for after eBay paid 2.6 Billion dollars for them. Not to even mention how profitable Youtube has been since Google paid a mere 1.65 Billion dollars for them.
Apple is sitting on a buttload of cash right now, but wouldn't it be a hell of a lot more logical for them to build a fab with it? They certainly have been gathering in a whole lot of chip design expertise lately.
There was an article recently that said most twits quit a month after joining. How popular is it relative to facebook? myspace? friendster? My own impression is that it isn't very popular, it just has some very vocal users.
During the time of the YouTube acquisition, it was often discussed that they might have done it in order to set precedents for copyright laws and other distribution-related stuff (net neutrality, etc.) since Google has better lawyers than YouTube could have hoped to afford at the time. Theory being that if Youtube was sued, they wouldn't have the funding to fight unfair charges and a precedent would be set against them and other providers of free content; whereas with Google backing them they'd have the funding and/or legal team to win and have it go in their favor. It sucks that our court system favors who has the better lawyers and not what's actually in the law books, but that's life.
Skype, on the other hand, was just a stupid choice by eBay. But you can't expect much different from a company that's founded around the very concept of bad buying decisions.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?