“Only in the bubble of Twitter-obsessed San Francisco would a buyout offer of $2.5 billion seem ‘insulting,'” Sid Yadav reports for VentureBeat. “Yet that is reportedly how executives at the microblogging startup saw an informal offer from Google and a larger offer of $4 billion from another bidder earlier this year.”
“Facebook previously made Twitter an all-stock offer of $500 million in 2008,” Yadav reports. “Apple also may have made an offer of $700 million, going as far in its due diligence as interviewing some key technical employees, last year, according to unconfirmed reports that were roundly dismissed at the time. Now that Apple has launched its own social network, Ping, and partnered with Twitter, though, those reports of Apple’s interest make far more sense.”
Yadav reports, “Everyone wants in on Twitter’s precious tweets, it seems. And the price tag keeps rising.”
Full article here.
Whoever wins that bidding war will regret it.
I wouldn’t give them 2 cents.,,,Total FAD!!
I don’t give a twit for it, either…
I’ve got two twitter accounts… and I just haven’t seen the value… it’s mostly a bunch of repeated tweets from twits.
The people who don’t see the value in twitter are likely the same people who saw no value in the beatles in iTunes. Like it or not, Twitter is BIG and only getting bigger.
I’m posting on MDN at the moment! Heading to the store in a sec.
“I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member.” — Groucho Marx
“I would not care to associate with anybody that thinks my mundane daily activities are worth following.” — iPhoner
lol Mike, you’re comparing Twitter to The Beatles? jesus, man, get a grip…do you compare Etch-A-Sketch to the Sistine Chapel?
Why not buy Beebo. It would be far cheaper and about the value Twitter will have in five or six years.
Some of the stuff in Twitter is amusing. The trick is following only people that have something intelligent or funny to say.
Facebook might have staying power if it can get a CEO with brains to replace Zuckerberg.
Twitter is a fad. Look at how quickly everyone forgot about Myspace.
Twitter is only beneficial to out of work comedians…
I believe this is a fad that will burn out as quickly as it burned up. It is a clever communications method but cannot sustain itself – in others words by itself, my twitting someone, produces no monetary value to the provider of the service (Twitter). So far there is no known way to make money long term from this paradigm except through advertising and that will only work if advertisers can be shown the value. And the value proposition is very doubtful.
Following some hot babe would be fun until you got arrested for stalking.
Trust me, don’t go there, it’s not worth it.
The question of value is determined by how you monetize it. How are you going to make money? When you figure that out, then you can put a price on it.
Twitter is worthless.
I’ll iCal most of you on this. I recall in 2007 that most respected minds thought that investing in Apple was a losing proposition. In case you haven’t noticed, businesses are using Twitter increasingly as a communications tool, and often news breaks first on Twitter.
Yes, there is a lot of banal blather on Twitter. I don’t want to know that you’re the Mayor of Starbucks in your neighborhood, or that you’re about to take a shower. But for example, this holiday season, retailers will offer special deals on Twitter. Corporations monitor Twitter closely to see what consumers and customers think of them – it lets business take the pulse of consumer sentiment. Increasingly, Twitter is how celebrities communicate with their fans, how film studios measure buzz on a new movie, and often is the first place where breaking news is reported.
So to those of you who doubt Twitter and call it a fad, I have a hunch that some very smart guys will be insanely wealthy in a few years. Also, I could not help but to note that Jack Dorsey, a Twitter founder, is already well on his way to another huge success with Square, which will change how credit cards are used by vendors and consumers alike.
I think I’ll go tweet this article…
@Brian
Very well said……….
I’m not out to disparage twitter, since there are those out there who do get it and are getting value out of it.
I guess I’m just an old fogey, because I really still do not get twitter. I guess I should get a copy of Twitter for Dummies so I can get a better understanding of it and how I might be able to derive value from it. Seriously.
It’s useful, to a degree.
E.g. a phone company could publish status updates for outages on their twitter-account(s) – and individuals could read them.
Of course, they could also publish them as RSS-feeds (few seem to grasp that concept, though), but twitter allows for some feedback from users.
2 bn is a bit much, though.
@Botnivik,
“lol Mike, you’re comparing Twitter to The Beatles? jesus, man, get a grip…do you compare Etch-A-Sketch to the Sistine Chapel?”
————–
No, I absolutely did not compare Twitter to the Beatles.
I said it’s likely the same group (tech geeks) not understanding the value of either. They simply didn’t understand the value or importance of The Beatles, because they don’t like The Beatles and therefore thought it was not a big deal.. but they were wrong..
Same scenario with Twitter, just because the tech geek MDN crowd doesn’t use or understand Twitter doesn’t mean tens of millions of kids don’t..
Like I said in The Beatles thread the other day..”Steve Jobs “gets it,” and that’s all that really matters since he’s the one running the company.”
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Twitter is in the process of maturing. It’s a lot like how blogs matured. In the beginning, blogs went through a “fad” phase where every random schmuck had to have a blog, and the blogosphere was nothing but a huge pile of random worthless crap written by people you no reason to care about. Eventually blogs matured to where a “cream layer” of blogs written about useful topics by someone worth reading rose to the top, where it was easy to subscribe to the good stuff and ignore all the noise. Twitter is on its way to that point.
While I have absolutely no interest in reading random tweets from random people, just as I never cared about Joe Schmoe’s blog, I like some of the specialty feeds that have developed. For example, sports teams that are far too small to get national TV or radio coverage will tweet the play-by-play of their games.
My main problems with Twitter is I don’t see how you ever make any money from it.
——RM
Every Steve job’s email answer look like at a tweet anyway . . .
Invisible clothes sewed with invisible thread. Twitter is the ultimate vaporware company, and the crowd loves it. Sheep eager for shearing. Baaahhh!
Nobody is doubting the usefulness of dropping a few lines to communicate. That seems fine. I think the problem is that Twitter has a very simple formula in a very simple site, and that seems easy to replicate with strong publicity.
Twitter won’t be alone. In few years or even months we will be “twitting” from anywhere. We won’t need Twitter. Google’s Buzz is just a start. Many others will come.