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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?"
and nothing of value will be lost.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
It would, at the very least, make for a much better Tweet App on my iPhone....
Twitter could be owned by the legion of doom and it still wouldn't make it interesting or remotely useful.
And, can Twitter decline an offer that is nearly three times their estimated worth?"
And how exactly was that value derived? Value is based on the present value of future earnings, and AFAIK, twitter has none. Any number in the hundreds of millions of dollars should be seriously looked at. What I don't understand is what Apple would do with Twitter.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
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?
Is there really much point in buying twitter? How difficult a thing is it to write that application? Or is the purpose almost entirely to grab the existing users?
And how would this fit into Apple's strategy? I could think of much better ways that Apple could extend their MobileMe service.
The whole thing seems slightly fishy to me.
I don't know, to me this Twitter tool is really synonymous with some sort of a twitch. Wouldn't the more appropriate name be 'Twitcher' with a slogan: Waiting for your twitch!
Seriously, 700 million USD for this just shows that a dollar is not worth that much today and also it shows that people don't know what else to invest their money into, they would jump on anything, reminds me of selling a pencil at 50% loss but 'making it up in volume'.
You can't handle the truth.
Hello, this is a yahoo and I'm a twit...
This reminds me of Novell buying Word Perfect. Paid over a billion dollars, couldn't sell for $100m just years later if their life depended on it. If Twitter refuses the offer, they are dumber than a sack of bricks. In a few years no one will pay attention to them. Just another useless, 15-minute-of-fame "Oprah technology".
End anonymous moderation and posting on
At first milidly interested in the technology, eventually appalled at the general lack of content.
Or to put it another way, twitter is the sound of millions of people collectively discovering they have nothing important to say. Or in today's "Pickles", "Is it me, or is the world getting sillier and sillier?"
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Its more than the application. Its the millions of users that come with it.
Twitter is hugely popular and has no earthly idea how to capitalize on that popularity without killing itself. It's like every other Web fad, before long it's going to fade away and be replaced by something at least as inane as it is.
The only hope for the Twitter founders is to sell to someone with deep pockets and few brains as quickly as possible. I don't know why Apple would want it, but maybe some old media company with more money than brains would.
And so did GeoCities and AOL but that didn't work out too well for Yahoo and Time Warner respectively. Users are fickle. They will move to other apps as trends dictate. Really I don't see the benefit to Apple. Now Apple might be talking to Twitter about better collaboration and integration.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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?
And how many of those millions aren't already included in the millions they have from the iPhone? Or the iTunes Music Store?
No, I don't buy it - and I bet Apple won't either!
Culture is more than commerce
can Apple get out of it that they can't just using the API?
Selling advertising isn't really what Apple does.
I could see Google speculation, although I would rather they implemented there own.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hmmm.. I imagine that if I had 29 BILLION dollars burning a hole in my pocket, I might consider buying the single most talked about web trend in current times; if for nothing more than to make my parent company among the most talked about things in current times. Good business sense.
Twitter has a very well known brand-name, probably about half of which comes from people bitching about it, or cracking jokes ("ok poop is coming out"). The application itself is nothing short of a status message, which where defined as early as May, 1993 (RFC 1459, Section 5.1) or earlier (RFC 742, December 1977 - finger w/plan), and there are dozens of "microblogging" sites out there already.
If anyone buys Twitter, it will only be for the most over hyped and thus well-known up-and-coming brand names of the last couple years.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
First Steve kills the Newton.
Then, MacBooks with no FireWire.
Now this.
OK, OK, we get it already. You hate us.
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
Twitter. Triumph of humanity
I admit I don't get the fascination.
Technically, its DIY IRC channel meets party-line SMS. Cool. The "how" I get.
But WHY? The "why" completely escapes me. Is Twitter more profound than the inanity of IRC and the incessant texting of pubescent students on public transport?
At best it looks like a way to share spontaneous brain dumps with mates, at worst it seems like a pathetic attempt at social closeness between a bunch of strangers you wouldn't even look at if you bumped into them.
Whatever it is - if Twitter is humanity's triumph then we're f**ked.
Either that or I'm an old fart.
Well considering this economy they might want to hold onto as much cash as they can. Apple traditionally buys companies that they really use. PA Semi was their last acquisition and it appears that they will design Apple's next iPod/iPhone chips. They bought NeXT and turned it into OS X. They bought the KeyGrip team and product from Macromedia that later became Final Cut. They bought Nothing Real for Shake, Emagic for Garage Band, etc.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I'd like to meet the person that coined the word "twitterverse". And hurt them. A lot.
Can you pare that down to 140 chars pls?
I would be nice if people could come up with vaguely realistic Apple rumours to increase their page hits rather than inane drivel like this. If anyone even remotely thinks this rumour is true then they have absolutely no clue. Period.
Sure, why not?
Why does the rumor mill, mass media, and business world assume that every company that strikes oil on the Internet need to be bought by a larger corporate entity once they've proven their worth? Not that I'm a huge fan of Twitter or anything, but the owners of the company have every goddamn reason not to sell the whole thing to behemoth like Apple.
Sure, they can cash out and get their millions of dollars now. Or, they can use their brains and make Twitter into a solid, consistent business model and make many more millions over the course of years or decades. Do you honestly think Google or Red Hat or Amazon would still be around if they sold out to the first bidder to come along? If Twitter wants to use its current success to build a foundation for a stable long-term company, they must remain agile and simply cannot let some big corporation tell them what's best.
I posed this very same question to a group of tech entrepreneurs in a list that I'm subscribed to. A lot of them see immense value in Twitter because of the speed in which things "click" on it. If you're "followed" enough, you can literally create one tag and have a massive following on the Internet playing along with it in a matter of minutes, largely because a lot of people use the service through their phones.
It's also a very effective marketing tool, as Oprah and Ellen DeGeneres have shown. In addition, it gives people who are totally un-tech-savvy a super simple outlet to pushing their ideas, which a lot of marketing folk fit nicely in (no offense to the sales people that are savvy).
A lot of people also find it a useful journalistic tool. The low-flying plane incident that happened in New York recently is a great example of Twitter's broadcasting power, since several thousand Twitter users wrote about it within minutes of it happening and almost certainly before the news outlets could get to it. The speed at which information spreads on there is fascinating, though the amount of crap that spreads follows the trend. It's kind of expected, though, when you mix well-informed people having fun with Twitter with those that lack even a slithering of character...
Again, I use it mostly for fun, but it's effectiveness almost wholly depends on those that you're connected to. In a matter of days, I found out about lots of specials and niceties that I would have been left out on without Twitter. Not saying that it's the best source for that, but it's pretty good. Wouldn't surprise me if it was a one-hit wonder, though.
I blve we r the smartest gen ever! My parents r dum and read 2$ newspprs 4 hours. I can read 30 secs on tw and get same info 4 0$ on my cpu!
Cupertino, CA, May 5, 2009 - Apple computer is rumored to be buying several flattened cigarette butts on the northwest corner of Castro St. and Central Expressway, in Mountain View, CA for $650 million. The cigarette butts are approximately 40 cm from the nearest curb edge. A squashed aluminum can, possibly a beer can, is in the gutter nearby. A paper bag with the partially wrapped remains of a beef burrito are also lying in close proximity to the cigarette butts, but do not appear to be part of the deal. In any event, a crow has been attempting to unwrap the burrito during most of the morning, presumably to abscond with the remains. Apple spokespersons declined to discuss the deal on the record, but it was made known later that the cigarette butts were in the middle of Silicon Valley, and therefore extremely valuable for that reason alone. One of the cigarette butts reportedly has lipstick stains, but that has not yet been confirmed.
The most famous, of course, is "Never start a land war in Asia," but only slightly less well-known is this: "Just because you can't think of a use for it doesn't mean that no one can."
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.
Are none of you seeing the big picture? Apple doesn't want to buy Twitter, the micro-blog service, they want to buy Twitter, the slashdot user. The actual GUY, not the username. They want a slave with a bajillion slashdot sockpuppets to moderate in articles just like this one.
From that page on apple's site about twitter clearly Apple thinks they have a similar dna.
What could it be used for? Well here's an idea called "Screw the RIAA".
In this monetization possibility (or fantasy you decide), Apple makes twitter groups for every rock band performance in the world, and anybody can twit on it about going there, the band can put special info and links to its site on it, you can basically start an indie craze from nothing.
Now Twitter makes me gag and I would hate using it or being forced to read it. But, it might be neat if you opened it to a lot of people per channel and used it to focus interest, the way usenet groups used to, and you can maybe make anybody with an Apple iphone etc. become a potential uploader to some flash crowd twitter group.
These band appearances and twitter threads lead people to the band's site for info, and to iTunes to download the band's stuff for money, and this is a realization of the model that everyone has talked about for ages about how to screw the RIAA and get bands to communicate and sell directly to their fans. Same could go for films, books, etc.
Only thing is, I don't see any reason why you couldn't build the same thing (twitter lookalike, easy, and iTunes type sales portal, not so easy). I suppose having the hardware and iTunes associations already, and the mass and early to market edge, might be enough to make Apple take a chunk out of the RIAA's sales and give authors a higher income. That and the advertising for ipods, iphones and iTunes, would be neat and might be worth the cash.