vs 
According to the Bits Blog at the New York Times, there were some talks between Facebook and Twitter, for the former to buy the latter but the deal is a no-go. Want to know how much Twitter’s asking price was? $500 million. Maaaan, that’s a lot of guap.
Saul Hansell says that Facebook was smart not to buy Twitter for that bloated price because there is very little evidence that Twitter will end up becoming a value-generator for Facebook.
I don’t think that Twitter is as important to Facebook as Facebook could have been to Yahoo. But the whole thing shows how hard it is come up with a value for this sort of Internet company.
Frankly, so much of the commentary about the “value” of these companies assumes there is some sort of calculation that will say whether Twitter is “worth” $500 million or $150 million, or whether Facebook is worth $1 billion or $15 billion. These are not utilities with predictable schemes of cash flow that can be discounted using an HP calculator. They are better seen as lottery tickets — companies that just might capture a lot of user attention in some specific area and then might find a way to profit from that attention.
I agree with this. It is a kind of impossible task to do any kind of profit-projection with this kind of thing but I mean the buzz that Twitter has makes for Facebook to consider this very carefully. Maybe they’ll come back and offer again.
Facebook and Twitter have swapped places. It wasn’t that long ago that Facebook was rejecting offers for a buy-out left and right over price.
X-posted at Human Potential.
8 responses so far ↓
hurryupnbuy // November 25, 2008 at 11:56 am |
funny thing is i read yesterday that it was twitter who turned down the $500 million from facebook.
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http://hurryupnbuy.wordpress.com
SH // November 25, 2008 at 11:59 am |
That’s right. That’s what the article said. Twitter’s asking price was $500 mil. Craaaaazy.
I wonder how they presented their value. What kind of logarithm and visual schemes were they using? Do you think that .ppt file is somewhere on the Web? It would be very interesting.
hurryupnbuy // November 25, 2008 at 12:11 pm |
i think they went in with the same mindset as myspace when they were bought out. i mean, twitter right now is as big as what myspace was then, no? or at least thats what i think.
and YES i still do need help with the twitter feeds, im a total noob when it comes to blogging.
jeff chang’s friend olivia wang, huh? ill def have to look into her. any particular works in general?
gza’s recent music output has been weak as is for most of the wu but they are who they are. you cant deny that as you get older, its harder to relate to the relatively younger audience that listens to hip hop BUT you cant deny what they’ve done either.
SH // November 25, 2008 at 12:18 pm |
jeff chang’s friend is OLIVER Wang, a dude. he blogs for VIBE and is smart as hell.
as for twitter feeds, you gotta create an RSS feed. there’s no special twitter widget. here’s the FAQ link:
http://faq.wordpress.com/2007/09/12/can-i-have-a-twitter-badge/
though i know what you are saying in terms of cats getting old like the wu, how can you explain the disparity between someone like ghostface who still puts out fire and…sadly…the rest of the wu.
miles // November 25, 2008 at 12:40 pm |
my mother says ’speculation is one of the scariest things in this world today.’
Henry // November 26, 2008 at 1:33 pm |
i am close to agreeing with your mother
there is no way twitter is worth $500 million and definitely not to Facebook. I really do not see the motivation for Facebook to buy Twitter, seams like a totally pointless acquisition and waste.
HOWEVER, I do think Google should be very interested in Twitter, since all it would have to do to monetize the no revenue web 2.0 ‘hottie’ is just hook up twitter with google ads on every page. They can even adopt the Ning system in regards to Google ads where users can pay a monthly fee to control the ad revenue from their ning pages or not pay anything and just let twitter generate some cash from the ads on user’s twitter pages.
This could potentially see some backlash from the twittering community, so the ad layout better be sleek and sexy, which has not been google’s strong point.
all in all, twitter should start focusing on value instead of SPECULATION. Word to your mother for that one.
SH // November 26, 2008 at 3:49 pm |
@ Henry. You make very good points but you can see by searching “Google” on this blog’s search bar and see that I’m not exactly a fan of Google (despite the fact that I use so many of their products. Regardless, I bet Twitter will come up with some kind of ad deal at some point. We’ll just have to wait and see what that is and looks like.
But lastly, what’s with the speculation bashing? Beyond its merits for creativity, isn’t it just so much fun?
Twitter/Facebook deal revisited « Caught in the Web // December 4, 2008 at 3:24 pm |
[...] New York Times has given us a little bit more reporting on the failed Twitter and Facebook deal. As noted earlier, Twitter supposedly turned DOWN a $500 million in [...]