This morning yet another rumor hit the blogosphere around the globe when Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch announced that Google and Twitter were in talks of a buyout.
Shortly after the tabloids erupted, Kara Swisher over at AllThingsDigital debunked the rumor stating "While the news that Google was in "late-stage" talks to acquire Twitter, which TechCrunch reported last night, certainly sounds exciting, it isn"t accurate in any way, according to a number of sources BloomTown spoke to close to the situation."
According to Swisher the two companies have indeed been talking, but the discussions have focused on integrating Twitter"s real-time search technology with Google"s search engine. While everyone has their own opinion about Twitter, I think we can all agree that Twitter offers one of the best real time search engines. Hundreds of times now Twitter has been the source for breaking news from earthquakes to celebrity deaths, hours before main stream media goes live with the story.
Twitter"s co-founder Biz Stone has released a statement regarding these apparent talks, however not giving any details on what we are going to see in the future. "My inbox is flooded this morning with requests for a response to the latest Internet speculation about where Twitter is headed. It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects" said Stone, and goes on to say "Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we"re just getting started. We"ve got just over thirty employees now and we"re working out of a loft in San Francisco"s SoMA neighborhood."
One thing I noticed from the statement is that Stone said "independent company", which leads me to believe that TechCrunch is once again incorrect. It appears that Kara Swisher has set the story straight leading us to believe that Twitter and Google are indeed in talks of an integrated real-time search engine powered by Twitter. Who knows though as this is all speculation.