What would Google gain from the acquisition that they don't already have?

AFAIK Twitter allows search indexing and is already a publisher on their network.

>>What would Google gain from the acquisition that they don't already have?

Google will "enhance the tweets" by showing 4-5 "relevant ads" before you even see the tweet. Tweethancer

They don't provide their realtime firehose for free, though.

Surely that cost isn't anywhere near $24B, which is the market cap for Twitter.

For 24B, you get Twitter (an asset), plus its Firehose. I was mostly pointing at then Twitter has data that google does not.

Yeah, they've failed at every attempt of making a pure social network (they bought youtube, its a kind of social network) with Microsoft buying github, it would be prudent of them to buy Twitter before someone else does.

That crossed my mind the minute I read the headline too. I can imagine folks at Google getting excited about this first step...

It will be interesting to watch. My hunch is that after looking at the shit storm that is happening around Facebook, Google may be having second thoughts about being in the social networking business (youtube excluded).

With Twitter's current state and Google's moves to kill their social side, this is unlikely. Why buy a moderate sized social network when you just killed your similarly sized social network?

If you're referring to G+, I don't think G+ was a "moderate sized social network" any more than twitter (although in opposite directions).

Also, imo, calling them "similarly sized" would be incorrect, except perhaps in signed up users (from which google got a ton from the "login with google and your account is already setup", not daily active users)

300 million monthly active users on G+ to Twitter's 335 million monthly active users, they were nearly identical in size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B#Growth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter (see sidebar)

Google may have been exaggerating these numbers. From https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expeditin...

> Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds

Is that countint actual use of Google Plus or does that count anything that connects to it (comment boxes, YouTube, etc.).

Hell, the Chromecast screensaver photos are hosted on Google Plus.

Don’t forget that they ran logins and notifications for everything through the Google+ interface and did things to juice the numbers like uncontrollable push notifications every time someone you’d ever exchanged email with joined (hi random person who bought a bookcase on Craigslist!).

The G+ numbers looked suspicious if you ran any sort of public website, where e.g. I saw metrics for referrals or shares at least an order of magnitude lower than Facebook or Twitter.

Wow, really?? In that case, what caused G+ to fail? I was always under the impression that it was due to (low) DAUs.

The Wikipedia article goes on to talk about G+'s very low engagement. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter's engagement rates were somewhere near Facebook's.

> User engagement on Google+ was low compared with its competitors; ComScore estimated that users averaged just 3.3 minutes on the site in January 2012, versus 7.5 hours for Facebook.[22][23]

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B#Growth)

That makes you question if they actually had 300 millions "active" users.

High MAUs doesn't necessarily translate to high DAUs.

Indeed, and high DAUs doesn't translate to a high number of engaged users either. Just a 301 HTTP redirect through a domain as part of a chain can count as DAU and mean nothing.

yeah i visited g+ primarily for the active dev communities oriented around google products. def just once or twice a week and the activity on those "circles" was pretty slow

Slow growth/lack of user traction was what caused Google to pull the plug. Its a similar overarching problem to Twitter, but more of users being disinterested than actively repulsed due to the content the most popular users of said service post...