The rumour mill has it that Google is back at the negotiating table to buy Twitter. The twipping point has tipped the scales in Twitter’s favour. According to this IT PRO article (April 3) or the TechCrunch article (April 2), the deal is close. If the price is over $500 million (per the rumoured price offered by Facebook a few months ago), let’s say $700 million for rounding purposes, that would put the price at a nice round $100 per current (monthly) Twitterer (based on the Feb data that Twitter had 7 million monthly users). I remember back to the days when Dennis Leibowitz, the 1980s standout DLJ Institutional Investor (II) winning research analyst for cable and then cellular companies, would price companies on a per pop basis, before moving to a cash flow evaluation and then to a more standard EPS model. Here we must be having plenty of discussions around dollars per eye balls, per members, per twits… and all those on discounted future numbers. Having already sold Blogger to Google, the founders of Twitter are aware of what it takes to make a sale, so the Google Gates (not the Microsoft ones) are surely well open.
If the deal does get signed, I would have to believe many companies are finally going to wake up to the idea of getting involved with Twittering… Perhaps, it will be a boon for the other microblogs too. I still think there needs to be a lot of intermarrying/interconnecting between the various social media sites to take to the next level. As TechCrunch alludes to, Twitter will surely be at the heart of new functionalities and communities: search.twitter.com or www.brand.twitter.com (not yet done), etc. This affair will certainly be interesting to follow.
