Why Google Isn’t Buying Twitter
Google recently made a blog post highlighting their different Twitter accounts. This set off a mass of speculation regarding Google and Twitter and an “impending purchase”. One of the most ridiculous Twitter comments I saw was; “Google has 45 accounts on Twitter: why not just buy them?”.
No offense to @the_gman, he was just retweeting a link. However, the question itself is laughable at best. First, having many accounts to communicate with your customers via a popular medium does not qualify it for purchase. Twitter is not going to sell itself for anything less than $1Billion. Google is hoarding it’s cash just like everyone else during this recession.
Second, with traffic to Twitter (via the web) down, and growing rapidly via 3rd party applications, Google is simply “getting the milk, without buying the cow”. They are introducing the new Google Wave app, which will consolidate the attention of Google’s huge user-base no matter what social network they are involved in.
By making Google Wave open-source, 3rd party developers are going to take the application, use their creative energy to tweak and develop the app to their hearts content without Google having to spend a cent.
If anything, with Twitter working hard to develop a profitable business model, it will be in their interest to rapidly bring that concept to life or Google Wave will simply steal the focus and surpass Twitter in capabilities.
Many people view Twitter as the ultimate in real time search but in truth, Google Wave is again, beating twitter hands-down! With the ability to converse in private, public, real-time, or threaded email, Wave is a fully branded, all-inclusive Google product that makes the communication lives of people amazingly easy.
To sum it up, here are some highlight-points of my position:
- It’s not economically smart for Google to buy Twitter. Just learn from them, develop Wave and beat them.
- Google Wave is already winning against Twitter in performance and it’s not even in public Beta
What’s your take on the Twitter / Google relationship?
Agreed. A company’s usage of a service does not necessarily equate into a possible purchase. After all, it could be Google looking at the best parts of Twitter and figuring out how to implement them in Wave.
Great insight, as always Sam.