The speculations about a rumored sale of Twitter are getting pretty loud. The funniest one is Apple might buy the company. Newscorp makes a lot more sense to me, as I’ve said before.
I just don’t get the Apple rumors, the companies couldn’t be further from each other in culture and approach. Most of the folks I know at Twitter use Macs, but…not sure that makes for a $700mm deal. Newscorp, on the other hand, has a real issue with Myspace, which missed the real time train and needs to get back on track.
And Google, well, we all know why Google (or Microsoft) would be interested. Both, however, are wondering whether the monetization efforts they currently have for HTML search would scale to real time search, and both are surely testing that first, with uncertain results, from what my sources tell me. The build/buy calculators are out in force over at each of these company’s corp dev departments.
Then there’s dark horse Yahoo. It’d be a real stretch for this company to win the heart of Ev and co, but I wouldn’t rule them out.
For now, I think the reality is that Twitter is focused on boiling its own ocean. It’s a major task, but why not keep trying? Sure, there’s always a price, but so far, it seems that price ain’t high enough to keep Twitter’s team from focusing on the tasks at hand.