Google, by Rodney Rumford
Google should hypothetically purchase Twitter for a variety of reasons. Google is so yesterday. The world is transitioning to the "real-time web" and giving rise to the status update. While what appears as minutia in the form of a tweet is actually quite valuable if the data is mined and presented properly in real-time.
Twitter is actually an ecosystem that allows hyper connectivity and real-time immediacy. Users discover news, get recommendations, and talk about brands, teams and business, while finding information about what their network thinks on virtually any topic. Twitter knows more about what I am interested in than any website. Google could parse that data and make my web experience much more customized and actually use this knowledge to tell me (via advertisements) about things that I did not know I wanted to know about, but that are actually valuable.
Google could rank websites based on an algorithm of the number of people that have tweeted and linked to a particular website. If "influentials" actually tweet a link, it could make Google's results even more enhanced with "commentary" around website content and what people say about it. It could also look at tweeted links to break trending news stories, articles, blog posts, images, etc., around a search result.
Google could layer conversations on top of maps to show what people are saying about any location. (Paris is wonderful this time of year.)
Google could immediately display what my social graph is saying about any topic, brand, or business that I search for on Google. Twitter really lends itself to location-based awareness, and this could translate into hyper-local ad serving.
Users of a Twitter-enhanced Google would benefit from immediate, real-time data across a multitude of services. Imagine if you could see the five latest relevant tweets from your social graph that sent you an email to your Gmail account based on the content of the email.
The main obstacle standing in the way of an acquisition is the founder's vision of what Twitter will or could become. Twitter has ample VC funds to give it quite some time to figure out the business model. I believe that the Twitter founders think that selling now would "feel" like a failure, although it would be a financial success.
At this point, Google would most likely have to pay Twitter somewhere close to a billion dollars. While Twitter does not have a proven revenue model, it has a proven form of communication that the world is quickly adopting -- with 7 million users that are not going away. Twitter is creating value by building off of Metcalfe's law and creating a network of hyper connections and real-time content. So, what is the value of that data? Should Twitter and Google get married? I think they should at least consider dating.
Rodney Rumford is founder of Gravitational Media and author of the book: "Twitter as a Business Tool." You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/rumford.
