5 ms·

Sources: Google In Talks To Acquire Twitter

90 points by johns 18y ago

barredo 18y ago
Techcrunch gossip. Arrignton adds in a comment: > its well sourced, but who knows. Usually simply posting the rumor shakes a lot more information out of the tree. We’ll be updating. Yeah. Sure.
- brandnewlow 18y ago
  And when/if he's proven wrong? What real consequences will he face? None.
  - JabavuAdams 18y ago
    Meh. Start a site, like longbets, where you retroactively compare pundits' predictions with what actually happened.
    - jonknee 18y ago
      One of those just started: http://wrongtomorrow.com/ http://wrongtomorrow.com/ I should start adding Mike Arrington quotes, he's almost as bad as Scoble.
      - yan 18y ago
        exactly the idea I had for a site.
        Splines 18y ago
        Hah - I had a similar idea, except it wasn't pundits that you measured, it was regular people. You could make predictions, for the future, and people could vote up the "truthfulness" of them as time went by. You'd need some sort of penalty to discourage people from predicting everything under the sun though. Of course, ideas are cheap...
        yan 18y ago
        Yeah, I just wanted to create a site where people can submit articles, blog posts or just any predictions about the future and a maturity date. At the maturity date, you can mark it correct or incorrect. Only then can you sort out intelligent predictions from noise.
        jodrellblank 18y ago
        See Derren Brown's "The System". You wouldn't sort out intelligent predictions from noise, you'd sort out (intelligent and/or lucky) predictions from noise. Which still wouldn't give you any idea which future predictions to trust.
        Zaak 18y ago
        Discount the value of a correct prediction by how many predictions were made by that person. You'd need some way to prevent making a lot of sock puppet accounts, but that's probably doable.
        jlees 18y ago
        http://www.hubdub.com/ http://www.hubdub.com/ ?
        deleted 18y ago
        [deleted]
        glenstein 18y ago
        Wow, I guess I'm #3. But my idea quickly expanded into a full fledged "credibility index"- because why not keep track of present-day claims they make about things already known to be false? It seems like one in the same issue to me. And wouldn't it make sense to quantify the vagueness/concreteness of statements made? It's easy for a pundit to say something is "dangerous for America" without giving a specific consequence, and people who make specific predictions that are borne out deserve more credit than people who make vague claims that can't be either affirmed or falsified. And from there, why not keep track of how many times a commentator uses equivocating devices like "borders on", "all but certain", "just short of"? And then, what about commentators who keep predicting a specific thing will happen but ascribing different causes to it? You can also measure how "substantive" a commentator tends to be by looking at the frequency with which concrete facts or examples are cited to support their claim, vs. how many times vague subjective judgments are invoked, vs. how many times nothing is brought forward to support the claim at all. You can measure how frequently a commentator tends to repeat the same news event or same analysis. You can take transcripts of their shows and put them into a program that determines what reading level, (in terms of school grades like 7th grade, 9th grade...) their discussion was judged to be at. And there are probably tons of others. Granted, systems like this, if they caught on, could turn around and bite us like those stories about wish-granting genies with a sense of irony- surely this would result in a whole host of unanticipated structural biases generated by such stats that change the character and quality of the discussion; surely pundits would find, even discover, new ways to misinform and adapt to the structure accordingly. But that has already happened. Pundits already speak in a language designed to make as many claims as possible without being on the hook in any way that risks their credibility. So while it would create new biases, I think it would overturn a whole bunch of pre-existing biases that I think are much worse (or at least shed light on them). This is a long-winded way of saying I really want something like this to happen, and to work.
        gwern 18y ago
        Whoa there! Sounds like you let the perfect be the enemy of the good! That's unfortunate; think of all the lost time.
        18y ago
      - jimbokun 18y ago
        "But discussions between the companies are confirmed." Strictly speaking, there is no prediction in the article. This is a claim about the present. Granted, he has already had to amend the original claim ("late stage" vs. "early stage" talks), so take him to task over that rather than imply a prediction is being made.
        whughes 18y ago
        That's true, but I think that it is nitpicking. There is a claim here: "Google in talks to acquire Twitter" -- which has a questionable truth value. This is exactly the type of statement which a predictions site could test (whether it is true or not).
    - qeorge 18y ago
      HubDub (a prediction market) has been doing this for nearly a year: http://punditwatch.hubdub.com/ http://punditwatch.hubdub.com/ TechCrunch's score is a telling 13%.
      - ashot 18y ago
        these scores are not comparable because they are missing a critical piece of the puzzle: the likelihoods of your predictions. I predict everyday for the rest of the year that the dow jones will be above 2 and below 4 million. The right measure is to take the difference between market and pundit opinion (you know like a real market, except unlike companies these always end at 1/0 on a certain date - like a covered option) and average that. This is their real performance.
        glenstein 18y ago
        This is definitely true. Plus, I think these are open to abuse. If the submissions are coming from a self-selected user base, surely its possible to self-servingly interpret certain statements as "predictions" that aren't, or a certain set of events as "proving" a prediction in one way or the other. There is only so much fudging that can occur, of course. But this kind of on-the-margins behavior is a new challenge that this relatively new breed of sites will have to deal with.
        Eliezer 18y ago
        No, they took that into account.
    - brandnewlow 18y ago
      But still. How will that affect him at all? There are no consequences for him being wrong. He won't lose advertisers. He won't lose RSS readers. He only gains pageviews, mindshare, subscribers and google hits by running this stuff and then updating it later to say it's not true. I don't have a point here, this just strikes me as a pretty weird situation.
      - tdavis 18y ago
        It probably has to do with the ultimate irrelevance of the information being presented. I read the headline and cared for all of 2 seconds. If you were a respected pundit and you said "Global warming will kill us in a year if we don't all buy electric cars tomorrow", and we all went and bought electric cars, and you were wrong, the consequences would likely be far more severe. Arrington posts unfounded rumors. About the Internet. Eh.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
_bn 18y ago
I find it funny how Arrington links to previous posts where he cites himself having some profound knowledge about the importance of a company or product. Hey mike, you're a journalist, not a CEO. When it comes to business, you really don't know your head from your ass.
- palish 18y ago
  Would you say that in person? No? Then don't say it here. By the way, I think Mike has posted here once or twice.
  - dawson 18y ago
    What if he would say it in person? 'just saying! But, if he would, then he can say it here and did.
    - palish 18y ago
      Then he's rude and won't be invited to my birthday party. The point is to be cordial to one another.
- ryanwaggoner 18y ago
  Ummm...actually, TechCrunch may have started as Mike posting stories in his underwear years ago, but it's a thriving startup in its own right today, between TC, Crunchbase, TC50, Crunchgear, etc, etc. I bet the whole mess is worth $50 - 100m.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    Define "worth" in that context. Do you really think someone would pay that much for it now?
    - 18y ago
albertni 18y ago
"Updated: Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine." Why am I not surprised. Translating the original article through the Techcrunch filter in my brain had already produced the mapping "late stage" -> "early stage or not at all".
rjurney 18y ago
If Google will make my entire twitstream searchable, then I am all for this even though I expect that Google will stagger Twitter's innovation. I lose info I need in tweets, and it annoys me.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
mattmaroon 18y ago
"Real time search" is a great new buzzphrase, like "social graph", used to make a startup sound important rather than just popular and to therefore justify lofty valuations. Any information worth having will still be worth having a half hour later when you can find it on real news outlets, professionally written and researched and with more than 140 characters. This is all predicated on the ridiculous notion that "shit, a plane just crashed in the Hudson, that was freakin awesome" is news. If anything, that very event proved that people crave much more than headlines. They spent a few hours reading about it on Twitter and a few weeks watching about it on CNN.
- bluelu 18y ago
  As if the engineers at google were too stupid to implement real time search of a limited source set... :-) If you search something that's not very common on twitter, the search will take forever (> 10 seconds to return results).
billydean 18y ago
Haha, man would Doug Bowman be pissed.
- jcapote 18y ago
  Haha, good one. (not being sarcastic, btw)
geuis 18y ago
This is the worst thing that could happen to twitter. Google's brand doesn't have quite the same cachè it used to. Today, it means being bought with no improvements to the service for at least a year after that. Look at Grand Central and Jaiku as examples.
- sam_in_nyc 18y ago
  They wouldn't have to brand it as Google. Think: Yahoo buying Flickr. I also could imagine some pretty terrible things happening to Twitter... like, for example, the site displaying "FUCK OFF" on every page load, forever.
  - taciturn 18y ago
    That certainly does seem unwise.
  - ahoyhere 18y ago
    Yahoo! couldn't resist fucking with Flickr, though. Or delicious. Think about the damn tying it to freakin Yahoo! accounts, which look like they're out of the stone age, and the "you have to log in every 2 weeks to save a bookmark" feature they added to delicious, etc., etc. etc. If people fuck with Twitter like that, it'll be gone. Service instability is one thing. Adding so much friction is another.
    - sam_in_nyc 18y ago
      Not being a Flickr or Delicious user myself, other than created an account to try it out, I don't know all the end-user effects of the Yahoo acquisitions. But it seems like Flickr and Delicious have turned out alright!
- ojbyrne 18y ago
  Ok, spelling/grammar nazi time. The accent over cache would be only slightly pretentious if you didn't have it pointing the wrong way (caché is the slightly archaic spelling you're struggling to remember). But the fact that the word you're looking for is "cachet" makes it a double fail.
sammcd 18y ago
For some reason, I just don't see this happening. If I just sold a company to google 5 years ago, why would I want to sell them another? I think it is much more likely they are collaborating on a project.
dwillett 18y ago
Twitter. The bane of my existence.
vaksel 18y ago
Not buying it. This is Google we are talking about, their main move has always been to release their own version of the service, hope to win, and only if that fails, do they open up their pocket book. But a broken clock is still right twice a day, so who knows, maybe Arrington's source isn't full of it
- vang3lis 18y ago
  > This is Google we are talking about, their main move has always been to release their own version of the service, hope to win, and only if that fails, do they open up their pocket book. But it failed! See what happened to Jaiku
  - jalammar 18y ago
    Jaiku was also bought, not developed in-house.
- eirikref 18y ago
  I'm not quite sure I agree. If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google, you will see that they have often bought companies as well. In some cases you might argue that they have bought less known companies, refactored and rebranded the service, and then used it to go after the marked share of a more known service.
- siculars 18y ago
  i would wager that google is not buying the service , rather the community. many twitter clones exist but the community is with the original - and that is what is valuable, the data they produce.
shafqat 18y ago
There is no way Twitter is going to sell itself for under 1B. They already raised at a 250M valuation, and with the team of investors they have behind them, there will be a lot of pressure to hold out until 1B or somewhere close to that.
medianama 18y ago
Google is best poised to monetize twitter.. $250mn seems low though.
axod 18y ago
Come on now, we all know TechCrunch is ridiculously pro-twitter. I doubt there's too much in this TBH.
adamhowell 18y ago
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the fact that, most likely, Evan Williams has no desire to go back to Google.
10ren 18y ago
Today I saw a sign outside a shop, saying "follow us on twitter". I didn't realize how mainstream twitter has already become.
dejb 18y ago
I can see a thread folding algorithm needing to be developed.
- ComputerGuru 18y ago
  No. Please no.
antidaily 18y ago
Makes sense: twitter is a great awesome search tool. For instance, I find myself searching "media temple" when my server is crawling just to see if anyone else is experiencing the same issues.
palehose 18y ago
I wonder if Twitter would have to re-write all their Ruby on Rails code into Java since Ruby is not a supported language at Google.

90 points by johns 18y ago

Techcrunch gossip. Arrignton adds in a comment: > its well sourced, but who knows. Usually simply posting the rumor shakes a lot more information out of the tree. We’ll be updating. Yeah. Sure.

brandnewlow 18y ago
And when/if he's proven wrong? What real consequences will he face? None.
- JabavuAdams 18y ago
  Meh. Start a site, like longbets, where you retroactively compare pundits' predictions with what actually happened.
  - jonknee 18y ago
    One of those just started: http://wrongtomorrow.com/ http://wrongtomorrow.com/ I should start adding Mike Arrington quotes, he's almost as bad as Scoble.
    - yan 18y ago
      exactly the idea I had for a site.
      - Splines 18y ago
        Hah - I had a similar idea, except it wasn't pundits that you measured, it was regular people. You could make predictions, for the future, and people could vote up the "truthfulness" of them as time went by. You'd need some sort of penalty to discourage people from predicting everything under the sun though. Of course, ideas are cheap...
        yan 18y ago
        Yeah, I just wanted to create a site where people can submit articles, blog posts or just any predictions about the future and a maturity date. At the maturity date, you can mark it correct or incorrect. Only then can you sort out intelligent predictions from noise.
        jodrellblank 18y ago
        See Derren Brown's "The System". You wouldn't sort out intelligent predictions from noise, you'd sort out (intelligent and/or lucky) predictions from noise. Which still wouldn't give you any idea which future predictions to trust.
        Zaak 18y ago
        Discount the value of a correct prediction by how many predictions were made by that person. You'd need some way to prevent making a lot of sock puppet accounts, but that's probably doable.
        jlees 18y ago
        http://www.hubdub.com/ http://www.hubdub.com/ ?
        deleted 18y ago
        [deleted]
      - glenstein 18y ago
        Wow, I guess I'm #3. But my idea quickly expanded into a full fledged "credibility index"- because why not keep track of present-day claims they make about things already known to be false? It seems like one in the same issue to me. And wouldn't it make sense to quantify the vagueness/concreteness of statements made? It's easy for a pundit to say something is "dangerous for America" without giving a specific consequence, and people who make specific predictions that are borne out deserve more credit than people who make vague claims that can't be either affirmed or falsified. And from there, why not keep track of how many times a commentator uses equivocating devices like "borders on", "all but certain", "just short of"? And then, what about commentators who keep predicting a specific thing will happen but ascribing different causes to it? You can also measure how "substantive" a commentator tends to be by looking at the frequency with which concrete facts or examples are cited to support their claim, vs. how many times vague subjective judgments are invoked, vs. how many times nothing is brought forward to support the claim at all. You can measure how frequently a commentator tends to repeat the same news event or same analysis. You can take transcripts of their shows and put them into a program that determines what reading level, (in terms of school grades like 7th grade, 9th grade...) their discussion was judged to be at. And there are probably tons of others. Granted, systems like this, if they caught on, could turn around and bite us like those stories about wish-granting genies with a sense of irony- surely this would result in a whole host of unanticipated structural biases generated by such stats that change the character and quality of the discussion; surely pundits would find, even discover, new ways to misinform and adapt to the structure accordingly. But that has already happened. Pundits already speak in a language designed to make as many claims as possible without being on the hook in any way that risks their credibility. So while it would create new biases, I think it would overturn a whole bunch of pre-existing biases that I think are much worse (or at least shed light on them). This is a long-winded way of saying I really want something like this to happen, and to work.
        gwern 18y ago
        Whoa there! Sounds like you let the perfect be the enemy of the good! That's unfortunate; think of all the lost time.
        18y ago
    - jimbokun 18y ago
      "But discussions between the companies are confirmed." Strictly speaking, there is no prediction in the article. This is a claim about the present. Granted, he has already had to amend the original claim ("late stage" vs. "early stage" talks), so take him to task over that rather than imply a prediction is being made.
      - whughes 18y ago
        That's true, but I think that it is nitpicking. There is a claim here: "Google in talks to acquire Twitter" -- which has a questionable truth value. This is exactly the type of statement which a predictions site could test (whether it is true or not).
  - qeorge 18y ago
    HubDub (a prediction market) has been doing this for nearly a year: http://punditwatch.hubdub.com/ http://punditwatch.hubdub.com/ TechCrunch's score is a telling 13%.
    - ashot 18y ago
      these scores are not comparable because they are missing a critical piece of the puzzle: the likelihoods of your predictions. I predict everyday for the rest of the year that the dow jones will be above 2 and below 4 million. The right measure is to take the difference between market and pundit opinion (you know like a real market, except unlike companies these always end at 1/0 on a certain date - like a covered option) and average that. This is their real performance.
      - glenstein 18y ago
        This is definitely true. Plus, I think these are open to abuse. If the submissions are coming from a self-selected user base, surely its possible to self-servingly interpret certain statements as "predictions" that aren't, or a certain set of events as "proving" a prediction in one way or the other. There is only so much fudging that can occur, of course. But this kind of on-the-margins behavior is a new challenge that this relatively new breed of sites will have to deal with.
      - Eliezer 18y ago
        No, they took that into account.
  - brandnewlow 18y ago
    But still. How will that affect him at all? There are no consequences for him being wrong. He won't lose advertisers. He won't lose RSS readers. He only gains pageviews, mindshare, subscribers and google hits by running this stuff and then updating it later to say it's not true. I don't have a point here, this just strikes me as a pretty weird situation.
    - tdavis 18y ago
      It probably has to do with the ultimate irrelevance of the information being presented. I read the headline and cared for all of 2 seconds. If you were a respected pundit and you said "Global warming will kill us in a year if we don't all buy electric cars tomorrow", and we all went and bought electric cars, and you were wrong, the consequences would likely be far more severe. Arrington posts unfounded rumors. About the Internet. Eh.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

_bn 18y ago

I find it funny how Arrington links to previous posts where he cites himself having some profound knowledge about the importance of a company or product. Hey mike, you're a journalist, not a CEO. When it comes to business, you really don't know your head from your ass.

palish 18y ago
Would you say that in person? No? Then don't say it here. By the way, I think Mike has posted here once or twice.
- dawson 18y ago
  What if he would say it in person? 'just saying! But, if he would, then he can say it here and did.
  - palish 18y ago
    Then he's rude and won't be invited to my birthday party. The point is to be cordial to one another.
ryanwaggoner 18y ago
Ummm...actually, TechCrunch may have started as Mike posting stories in his underwear years ago, but it's a thriving startup in its own right today, between TC, Crunchbase, TC50, Crunchgear, etc, etc. I bet the whole mess is worth $50 - 100m.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  Define "worth" in that context. Do you really think someone would pay that much for it now?
  - 18y ago

albertni 18y ago

"Updated: Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine." Why am I not surprised. Translating the original article through the Techcrunch filter in my brain had already produced the mapping "late stage" -> "early stage or not at all".

rjurney 18y ago

If Google will make my entire twitstream searchable, then I am all for this even though I expect that Google will stagger Twitter's innovation. I lose info I need in tweets, and it annoys me.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

mattmaroon 18y ago

"Real time search" is a great new buzzphrase, like "social graph", used to make a startup sound important rather than just popular and to therefore justify lofty valuations. Any information worth having will still be worth having a half hour later when you can find it on real news outlets, professionally written and researched and with more than 140 characters. This is all predicated on the ridiculous notion that "shit, a plane just crashed in the Hudson, that was freakin awesome" is news. If anything, that very event proved that people crave much more than headlines. They spent a few hours reading about it on Twitter and a few weeks watching about it on CNN.

bluelu 18y ago
As if the engineers at google were too stupid to implement real time search of a limited source set... :-) If you search something that's not very common on twitter, the search will take forever (> 10 seconds to return results).

billydean 18y ago

Haha, man would Doug Bowman be pissed.

jcapote 18y ago
Haha, good one. (not being sarcastic, btw)

geuis 18y ago

This is the worst thing that could happen to twitter. Google's brand doesn't have quite the same cachè it used to. Today, it means being bought with no improvements to the service for at least a year after that. Look at Grand Central and Jaiku as examples.

sam_in_nyc 18y ago
They wouldn't have to brand it as Google. Think: Yahoo buying Flickr. I also could imagine some pretty terrible things happening to Twitter... like, for example, the site displaying "FUCK OFF" on every page load, forever.
- taciturn 18y ago
  That certainly does seem unwise.
- ahoyhere 18y ago
  Yahoo! couldn't resist fucking with Flickr, though. Or delicious. Think about the damn tying it to freakin Yahoo! accounts, which look like they're out of the stone age, and the "you have to log in every 2 weeks to save a bookmark" feature they added to delicious, etc., etc. etc. If people fuck with Twitter like that, it'll be gone. Service instability is one thing. Adding so much friction is another.
  - sam_in_nyc 18y ago
    Not being a Flickr or Delicious user myself, other than created an account to try it out, I don't know all the end-user effects of the Yahoo acquisitions. But it seems like Flickr and Delicious have turned out alright!
ojbyrne 18y ago
Ok, spelling/grammar nazi time. The accent over cache would be only slightly pretentious if you didn't have it pointing the wrong way (caché is the slightly archaic spelling you're struggling to remember). But the fact that the word you're looking for is "cachet" makes it a double fail.

sammcd 18y ago

For some reason, I just don't see this happening. If I just sold a company to google 5 years ago, why would I want to sell them another? I think it is much more likely they are collaborating on a project.

dwillett 18y ago

Twitter. The bane of my existence.

vaksel 18y ago

Not buying it. This is Google we are talking about, their main move has always been to release their own version of the service, hope to win, and only if that fails, do they open up their pocket book. But a broken clock is still right twice a day, so who knows, maybe Arrington's source isn't full of it

vang3lis 18y ago
> This is Google we are talking about, their main move has always been to release their own version of the service, hope to win, and only if that fails, do they open up their pocket book. But it failed! See what happened to Jaiku
- jalammar 18y ago
  Jaiku was also bought, not developed in-house.
eirikref 18y ago
I'm not quite sure I agree. If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google, you will see that they have often bought companies as well. In some cases you might argue that they have bought less known companies, refactored and rebranded the service, and then used it to go after the marked share of a more known service.
siculars 18y ago
i would wager that google is not buying the service , rather the community. many twitter clones exist but the community is with the original - and that is what is valuable, the data they produce.

shafqat 18y ago

There is no way Twitter is going to sell itself for under 1B. They already raised at a 250M valuation, and with the team of investors they have behind them, there will be a lot of pressure to hold out until 1B or somewhere close to that.

medianama 18y ago

Google is best poised to monetize twitter.. $250mn seems low though.

axod 18y ago

Come on now, we all know TechCrunch is ridiculously pro-twitter. I doubt there's too much in this TBH.

adamhowell 18y ago

I'm surprised no one's mentioned the fact that, most likely, Evan Williams has no desire to go back to Google.

10ren 18y ago

Today I saw a sign outside a shop, saying "follow us on twitter". I didn't realize how mainstream twitter has already become.

dejb 18y ago

I can see a thread folding algorithm needing to be developed.

ComputerGuru 18y ago
No. Please no.

antidaily 18y ago

Makes sense: twitter is a great awesome search tool. For instance, I find myself searching "media temple" when my server is crawling just to see if anyone else is experiencing the same issues.

palehose 18y ago

I wonder if Twitter would have to re-write all their Ruby on Rails code into Java since Ruby is not a supported language at Google.