[scratt]

Word on the street is $700 Million on the table, "late stage negotiations".

I wondered why the shares surged today....

[Wyatt]

Tech Crunch said the same thing about Google and twitter a few weeks ago. Surely in another few weeks, they'll claim the NY Times is buying Twitter. Then maybe Applebee's. Neither of them would make any more sense than Apple.

[edit] Also: http://technologizer.com/2009/05/05/...ing-to-happen/

[Wrao]

Well, I think that twitter has made its biggest impact in the cell phone world, it isn't entirely unfeasible that Apple would want to incorporate that into their rising star cell phone. Of course, you can 'tweet' just fine from an iPhone as is, so there is no direct service gain or functionality gain. But long-term there might be value.


Or maybe Apple just wants to pilfer a couple of designers.

[psmith2.0]

Applebee's...



"food sux lol ... but i still want dessert ... omg the waiter is so cute!!!"

But being serious for a moment...why bother? This is just the latest "thing", IMO. In 6-9 months, nobody's going to give a rip. MySpace fell by the wayside (18-24 months ago, it was the thing to be in/on). Then Facebook seemed to be the hot thing to go to (and everyone did). And now I've heard the word "Twitter" more in two months than I have in 40 years. Which, to me, means "comes on too fast, can't sustain...isn't meant for the long haul because people are too trendy/fickle", and there's always something newer/cooler around the corner.

Let's meet back here in one year (Cinco de Mayo, 2010) and see where Twitter is. Folks will have moved on to the Hot New Thing®, I'm 96% sure...CNN, Ellen, Oprah and all the rest will be on to something else entirely (and won't be saying "Twitter" every seventh word), and all their followers will go right along with them. Twitter will be like MySpace, a few folks remaining behind and wishing someone would visit them or give a damn about what they have to say.

[BuonRotto]

I call fake. Really ,really don't see how this fits in with Apple's plans. At all.

[addabox]

Originally Posted by pscates2.0 Applebee's... "food sux lol ... but i still want dessert ... omg the waiter is so cute!!!" But being serious for a moment...why bother? This is just the latest "thing", IMO. In 6-9 months, nobody's going to give a rip. MySpace fell by the wayside (18-24 months ago, it was the thing to be in/on). Then Facebook seemed to be the hot thing to go to (and everyone did). And now I've heard the word "Twitter" more in two months than I have in 40 years. Which, to me, means "comes on too fast, can't sustain...isn't meant for the long haul because people are too trendy/fickle", and there's always something newer/cooler around the corner. Let's meet back here in one year (Cinco de Mayo, 2010) and see where Twitter is. Folks will have moved on to the Hot New Thing®, I'm 96% sure...CNN, Ellen, Oprah and all the rest will be on to something else entirely (and won't be saying "Twitter" every seventh word), and all their followers will go right along with them. Twitter will be like MySpace, a few folks remaining behind and wishing someone would visit them or give a damn about what they have to say.

Well, I hope it's not a sign of my Long and Inevitable Slide into technological cluelessness, but I kinda hope so. Seems like it a perfectly nice tool for things like keeping track of everybody who's meeting at the restaurant, etc., but here in Twitter HQ Bay Area, it's an almost unbearable exercise in self referential tech triumphalism.

So you get things like Birdhouse, which, wait for it, allows you to store and edit your random brief thoughts before publishing. But the digerati are droning on like it was the invention of the printing press. ("Just try it. It's life changing") Really?

And then all the tech philosopher kings/entrepreneurs start blogging about the great new Twitter tools that let you create new structures to organize your seminars about how super creative modern people can monetize their plan to use Twitter to create crowd sourced paradigms to publicize yet another iPhone Twitter app, and they do it in this egregiously, gag inducing "this is what it means to be fully alive and smart and making things" way, and you just have to figure the whole thing's entered some kind of seriously unsustainable decadent phase and the whole crew is shortly to take up scrimshaw, just to clear their palette.

OK, so I'm in the belly of the beast here and probably kinda excessively tweaked, so forgive the rant. But it would be seriously out of character for Apple to lunge at the flavor of the month, especially when it's reached its "Oprah likes it!" phase of tiresomeness.

Or, just for another example, I was looking at a mattress web site, and there was the inevitable "Follow Me!" button.

Man, I really have it in for Twitter, apparently. Probably because I'm such a cranky old fuck.

[psmith2.0]

Maybe, but you say it all cooler than I ever could.

Your second and third paragraphs pretty much nailed it, IMO.

I'm sure Twitter, at its most basic and pure, has its uses. I don't doubt it for a second.

But the life and world you describe is hell on earth, and the exact evil I see it being used for instead.

[chucker]

Yay! Free traffic for TechCrunch!

Damn, this is way too easy for them. Can we at least… not link them?

[Argento]

I wish I could come up with something and sell it for 700 million dollars...

[jdcfsu]

Originally Posted by chucker Yay! Free traffic for TechCrunch! Damn, this is way too easy for them. Can we at least… not link them?

For real. I don't trust anything they publish. They break embargoes, publish rumors, etc. It wouldn't be bad if that was their sites purpose, but they're supposed to be some sort of legit news-type site, right?

[Moogs]

I hope not. Twitter is a useless fad and would be a distraction... a way for Apple to spread itself in the wrong direction and take a step towards "jack of all trades, master of none" status.

[addabox]

True. Plus, there's something about "cool new social media" and Apple that just don't seem to mix. Possibly the heavy hand of Jobs' old school inclinations?

Apple buying Twitter would be like your perfectly nice and smart but very slightly Mormon-ish Stanford educated uncle deciding he needed to do more clubbing.

[scratt]

Originally Posted by Moogs I hope not. Twitter is a useless fad and would be a distraction... a way for Apple to spread itself in the wrong direction and take a step towards "jack of all trades, master of none" status.

I agree completely with what you say. And am well aware of the earlier rumours.

Personally I think Twitter is the biggest waste of time since Facebook, and think it's extremely sad how people like even Gruber have fallen well and truly into the TwitBlog no brain black hole..

Having said all that. This rumour unfortunately is a little more real than the Google and ones. Time will tell. Fingers crossed it is wrong.

[FFL]

Originally Posted by addabox Man, I really have it in for Twitter, apparently. Probably because I'm such a cranky old fuck.

Of course, there is always the possibility that Twitter annoys Steve just as much as it does you (and most of the rest of us over 30, apparently), and he's gonna spend $700 million just to shut them the fuck up.

[addabox]

[psmith2.0]

Now that would be funny!

"I'm back, and my first first order of business after six months off...we're buying Twitter. But wait...there's just one more thing: we're killing it. So grow the hell up...nobody cares what you're eating for breakfast. You're not the center of the universe. I am...BWHHAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Welcome back, Steve.

[Robo]

[Luca]

I know I made fun of this rumor, but commenting on it in a serious manner... well, a programmer friend and I were discussing this earlier tonight and this is what he said.

First, the software used for Twitter is very, very simple. Any good programmer with database knowledge would be able to write it and maintain it. Wouldn't be hard for a small team of people to run the whole site with all its ~10 million users. He also said the bandwidth costs wouldn't be too incredibly high, maybe a few thousand dollars a month. I'm going based on what he said so maybe he's way off (he's been way off about stuff in the past but he's also very stubborn and I didn't want to argue his facts when I'm far less qualified to speak on the subject).

Essentially, his question was this: If Twitter doesn't advertise or charge for anything, how do they make money? How do they get venture capitalists to sink millions of dollars into them? And my follow-up question was this: If it only takes a small team of programmers and some decent web hosting to maintain a site like Twitter, where do those millions of dollars go? What is the point? They've got 29 people - even with generous salaries, it doesn't cost THAT much to pay all of them.

In the end we agreed that Twitter is going to suffer a similar fate that befell the tech bubble companies of the late 90s. This quote from their FAQ page seems to reinforce that (the question was, "How does Twitter make money?"

Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don't want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world. While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.

[scratt]

Hmm.. The "good programmer in a bed room" can be applied to virtually all the big internet companies.
It seems in the computer industry it's just the same as everywhere else. It's who you know, and when you do things that matters.. Sure a lot of people here at AN could make Twitter, eBay or even Google... and when the time came they could buy more bandwidth and servers etc. and in theory the revenue from ads, or from 'Angels' would cover that.. But they didn't. Digg, Twitter, etc. etc. all had the right contacts, the right 'word of mouth' and so on.. and foisted these monstrosities on us... The dream of making a startup in your bedroom, with a few good pals.. whilst still possible, is not realistic these days. Not really for anything other than the truly exceptional. Twitter is not exceptional.. So IMO right people, right place, right contacts, right time. End of.

As a lot of tech blogs have pointed out Apple is still going to make money from Twitter apps on the iPhone whether they have the company or not.. And it takes a lot of $1.99 apps to cover a $700,000,000.00 bill.
Frankly with Apple's exposure and market penetration I think they could 'make' Twitter2 for about 1/700th of that. They are certainly not interested in buying the idea.. Rather the current penetration of said idea.

Also Twitter is such an inane piece of narcissistic crap I think that FFL's theory holds more weight than any others.. Apple actually buying Twitter and branding their stuff with it for WWDC sounds like a nightmare of kitsch banners, and pointless merchandising for the sake of being relevant. Much more like an MS move than an Apple move...

I was simply reporting what I heard, and from more than the usual sources.

Do I think it will happen. Probably not.

Do I think it would be stupid if it did happen. Absolutely.

But perhaps Apple sees something we don't. Perhaps the talks are actually for something akin to the Google search box we have in Safari.. That I think is very possible, however unfortunate.

[joveblue]

Twitter doesn't do a single thing as good as Facebook does, and Facebook does a hell of a lot more really useful things, a hell of a lot better. Oh, and it has a revenue model.

[chucker]

I love it when people assume that, because Twitter is clearly not for them, it cannot possibly be for anyone else either.

[joveblue]

When you have one product that does one thing averagely and has no revenue model, and another product that does the same thing really well, plus a whole bunch of other things really well as well, while managing to avoid clutter, complication, bloat, etc., and has a revenue model, I think it's reasonable to make a prediction about which one will have the staying power...

Of course that also depends heavily on network effects...

[Gizzer]

Originally Posted by chucker I love it when people assume that, because Twitter is clearly not for them, it cannot possibly be for anyone else either.

Very good point.

I use Twitter over Facebook precisely because it does one thing very well, and very simply. For me it's essentially a realtime news ticker with a very focused set of sources. Nearly all the people I follow are either application developers (representing their software company) or certain gadget blogs. I basically get the lowdown on the apps I love to use (what features they are working on for version x) and the head's up as to when a new version is ready, and it gives me the opportunity to give "live" feedback to a developer by bypassing all the "Contact Us" pages on a website. Developers also seem to enjoy posting a quick Tweet rather than filling out a whole article on their blog.

It also means I get news as it happens, without me having to subscribe to RSS feeds. I'd much rather fire up a Twitter client on my iPhone to "read the news" than fire up an RSS reader, because I know exactly who and what type of news I will be getting.

I'm not interested in knowing what people ate for breakfast, but I am interested in keeping informed.

[Luca]

Originally Posted by Gizzer Very good point. I use Twitter over Facebook precisely because it does one thing very well, and very simply. For me it's essentially a realtime news ticker with a very focused set of sources. Nearly all the people I follow are either application developers (representing their software company) or certain gadget blogs. I basically get the lowdown on the apps I love to use (what features they are working on for version x) and the head's up as to when a new version is ready, and it gives me the opportunity to give "live" feedback to a developer by bypassing all the "Contact Us" pages on a website. Developers also seem to enjoy posting a quick Tweet rather than filling out a whole article on their blog. It also means I get news as it happens, without me having to subscribe to RSS feeds. I'd much rather fire up a Twitter client on my iPhone to "read the news" than fire up an RSS reader, because I know exactly who and what type of news I will be getting. I'm not interested in knowing what people ate for breakfast, but I am interested in keeping informed.

Yeah, I can certainly see the appeal. I can't speak for anyone else in the thread, but when I say I think Twitter's going to collapse or get absorbed by another company within a year, it's because I don't think it's a sustainable business model, not because I think it's worthless to everyone. Clearly, a lot of people like it.

So many people have blogs that it takes them forever to update. When you keep a personal blog, you feel obligated to type a bunch of stuff and really make each post feel meaningful, but the problem is that it requires more of a time commitment (you actually have to sit down and write something rather than just banging out 140 characters or less during your break). People end up putting it off, and the longer they put it off, the more stuff they want to talk about when they do eventually get around to writing the post, and that just delays it more.

So I can see the appeal. Oh yeah, and on top of that, people seem more comfortable with checking someone's Twitter feed than they are with subscribing to an RSS feed of a friend's blog. Not sure why. Maybe because Twitter-reading apps are just simpler and meant to do exactly one thing, whereas RSS is a catch-all for any website that is updated regularly.

For me, there is no reason at all to use Twitter:

- Only a few of my friends use it, vs. nearly all of them who have Facebook
- I have no mobile device that can access it, nor will I ever have one in the foreseeable future (too expensive to buy and to pay for on a monthly basis and zero benefit to me)
- 99% of the times that I actually want to keep in touch with people through computers instead of my phone, I am either at home or at work. If so, there's not much reason to get Twitter since the 140-character limit is very restricting. Facebook makes more sense if you're primarily accessing it through computers instead of underpowered, small-screened mobile devices.

[scratt]

Skype does everything that Twitter could do for me.. and more.
And I don't have to join yet another asinine online community. (Present company excepted, of course).

[torifile]

The best description of what Twitter does differently or better than Facebook is that Twitter connects you to people you don't know while Facebook connects you to people you do.

The value of Twitter for me has been in being able to search for specific terms and follow those people, whom I've never met in real life and probably don't want to, who have similar interests and thoughts. There's no investment in the relationship, I'm not worried about some stranger knowing anything about me I don't put on the publicly accessible web, etc.

As for a "business model"? People who don't yet realize that data is the most valuable and prized resource on the web don't get it. How much data does Twitter have? Can you imagine the targeted ad placement? Combine that with a very efficient and low cost enterprise and Twitter will be making money hand over fist very soon.

[_Ω_]

Originally Posted by FFL Of course, there is always the possibility that Twitter annoys Steve just as much as it does you (and most of the rest of us over 30, apparently), and he's gonna spend $700 million just to shut them the fuck up.

Would have saved Space Karen a lot of money

[chucker]

What a bizarre time jump.