Google Acquiring Twitter for More Than $250 Million Valuation?

Either Google is acquiring Twitter this week or Michael Arrington is desperate for traffic and stirring up rumors. I think that given the buzz around the Twitter Google news, the former is in the making. Arrington posts on TechCrunch that two trusted sources have confirmed that Google and Twitter are in talks for Twitter to be acquired by the search and communications company.

If this is accurate, it’s a brilliant deal for Google - the value of Twitter is only going to go up over time. And it will be Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s second sale to Google - they sold Blogger to them just five years ago. But there’s one big question - where’s Microsoft in all this? Letting Twitter go to Google only hurts them, badly, in the long term search game. This is an asset they need to be competing for aggressively.

Of course, there are sound connections between Stone, Williams and Google, as the same team behing Twitter launched and sold Blogger to Google close to 5 years ago. I was under the opinon however that another Google acquisition of a Stone Williams property was never to happen again. We’ll have updates on this rumor throughout that day.

Source: www.searchenginejournal.com

Has Twitter Solved Its Uptime Issues?

One of my favorite pastimes over the last year or so has been to tear Twitter apart over uptime issues. See, for example, Twitter Suffers Minor Period Of Uptime (my personal favorite), Twitter: Something Is Technically Wrong and Amateur Hour Over At Twitter?.

Twitter has been mostly stable for the last month or so, though. And today cofounder Biz Stone wrote an email to Twitter users that says they’ve had 99.9% uptime over the last couple of months:

Reliability Update

Twitter has been making great progress in terms of uptime and reliability. Fail Whale sightings are far less frequent these days thanks to our efforts but we still have a long journey ahead. Last month we saw 99.88% uptime and so far this month we are at 99.96%. Our engineering and operations teams have been taking a very methodical approach to improving Twitter. We’re using the word “craftsmanship” to characterize our work here at the office. Reliability and dependability continue to be top on or list of key goals.