(Eric Schmidt, Google CEO and Evan Williams, Twitter CEO)
Twitter just hired Dick Costolo to serve as their COO, according to the New York Times. Costolo helped found Feedburner, a company that was sold to whom? Uh, that would be Google of course. He then worked at Google following the acquisition.
Les McKeown, CEO of Predictable Success, says in a blog post, "Twitter's continued growth and success now depends entirely on what happens next to their internal culture. They've established the market, but further growth means finally generating substantial income."
McKeown refers to this as the whitewater stage of the business growth cycle. To take his model a step further, whitewater follows the fun stage. Can we all agree that's where Twitter has been for the last few months? VC money pouring in, user-base growing by leaps and bounds, growing ubiquity... I call that fun, don't you?
If you think back a few years, was it not precisely at that point when Twitter CEO, Evan Williams, sold his first company, Pyra Labs and its product, Blogger, to Google?
Let's put two and two together shall we?
- Evan Williams sells Blogger to Google approximately three and a half years after its creation, establishing precedent for future acquisitions.
- Thinking in terms of the growth of its user-base and time-frame since creation,Twitter is at a similar stage today as Blogger was at the time of its acquisition.
- Blogger did not have a healthy business model at the time of its acquisition; neither does Twitter at this point.
- Twitter has hired a number of ex-Googlers including, most recently, its new COO.
- Twitter is a real-time search engine; Google wants to incorporate R-T search.
I believe all the markers point to an acquisition of Twitter by Google, and I believe it will happen sooner rather than later. (Yea, I know...that's an audacious statement made by someone who lives far outside Silicon Valley. So what do I know. Still, it's what I believe.)
It's for certain Microsoft is not going to buy them. They've invested too heavily in Facebook, which now incorporates Bing into its newly-revised search component.
Here's how this is going to shake out. Google will buy Twitter. Microsoft will further its investment in Facebook. And then, there's Apple.
But that's just me. What do you think will happen?
Posted via email from Paul Chaney's [Other] Blog
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