Twitter will be Gwitter?

source: googlenews
Google is in late-stage negotiations to buy Twitter, in what would be a blockbuster pairing between the Internet goliath and one of the industry's hottest upstarts. On second thought, there aren't any acquisition talks. The two companies are simply discussing a routine business partnership.

The seesaw of contradictory reports has had the digerati, um, a'twitter since Michael Arrington, from the technology blog TechCrunch, posted an article saying, "Here's a heck of a rumor that we've sourced from two separate people close to the negotiations: Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter."

If true, the buyout would be a major development in the technology industry. Google would be getting a fast-growing microblogging service that has emerged as a social phenomenon over the past year.

For those of you not in the know, Twitter, in San Francisco, allows people to send messages, or tweets, of up to 140 characters.

But Kara Swisher, the blogger for AllThingsD's BoomTown, wrote a counterpost early Friday morning that shot down the TechCrunch rumor. While her rival's report "certainly sounds exciting," she said, "it isn't accurate in any way, according to a number of sources BoomTown spoke to close to the situation."

She continued: "In fact, Twitter and Google have simply been engaged in 'some product-related discussions,' according to one source, around real-time search and the search giant better crawling the microblogging service."

Arrington has since backtracked from his original post. In an update, he wrote that another of his sources said that the "discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine. But discussions between the companies are confirmed."

Given all the heavy breathing, Twitter addressed the issue in a blog post Friday morning titled "Sometimes we talk," albeit without adding any clarity.

"It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects," Biz Stone, Twitter's co-founder, said.