Geek In Disguise

The Intertubes were all a flutter yesterday with news of Google apparently being close to buying Twitter. Arrington posted the news which many took as confirmation of a done deal and then Kara weighed in with her view that it was hogwash. In the meantime, Mary Jo Foley said it’d be a mistake which Todd Bishop seemed to disagree with and Joe Wilcox took the view that it’d be a huge mistake for Microsoft to let Twitter go to Google.

Are you keeping up? Biz Stone from Twitter finally weighed in and downplayed the rumours but I suspect that isn’t the end of the saga. These rumours will continue and Twitter will continue to benefit from them both in terms of publicity and valuation.

What’s clear to me is that despite the naysayers telling me that Twitter will be old news next year (they said that last year) I think it’s firmly here to stay and if they do sell out, it’ll be an extremely valuable web property. Possibly more so than YouTube who Google acquired or even Yahoo who Microsoft tried to acquire. That’s a pretty bold statement, especially for something that most of the valley kids could code up in an afternoon. But they didn’t…Twitter did and now they’re way ahead of anyone who tries to copy them. First mover advantage is a much bigger deal in the era of web software than the good old packaged software days.

Don Dodge nails it with this post

 

Twitter is another proof point that valuation is not about how may lines of code, or how difficult it is to recreate, it is about deep audience engagement. Code can be replicated in a weekend, audiences can’t

Let us not forget that Google bought Jaiku in 2007 which was supposed to be the hot competitor to Twitter. Where is it now? Alive but really only in sustain mode with no chance of catching Twitter.

Twitter is here to stay…and the stories will persist. The latest one from Arrington is that @ev wouldn’t sell for less than $1bn. If it was anyone but Michael I’d say that was serious linkbaiting.