Is Twitter Founder Evan Williams Google’s Next Billion-Dollar Man?

The tech-business world is abuzz and atwitter this morning following a blog post from TechCrunch citing a rumor from several sources that Google is in active talks to acquire the web’s hottest property, Twitter. At this point, it is unclear whether Google is in full acquisition talks, or the two companies may be working on a partnership involving Twitter’s growing ‘search-focused’ features.

There are a few interesting angles regarding a potential Google-Twitter alliance:

a) Facebook recently (within the last 6 weeks) tabled an offer to buy Twitter for a rumored $500 million which Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone quickly rejected.

b) Google has had keen interest in the micro-blogging space from the beginning. Back in October 2007, Twitter’s primary competitor Jaiku was bought by Google for a rumored $12 million. Many people speculated that Google’s financial muscle and vast resources would turn Jaiku into a bonafide Twitter-killer. It didn’t happen. In January 2009, Google abandoned Jaiku and repackaged the code as ‘open source’, making it free for anyone to download and use.

c) This is deja vu for Twitter founder Evan Williams. In February 2003, Evan Williams sold Pyra Labs to Google. The assets of Pyra Labs became the foundation for Google’s popular Blogger.com publishing platform.

Could Twitter reject a potential billion-dollar offer? Will Microsoft swoop in at the last minute and make a blockbuster deal? For now, only rumors, tweets and questions. It will be interesting to see if there is any substance to this latest rumor.

What do you think will happen?

Related News:
Sorry to Get You All A-Twitter, But Google Is Not in “Late-Stage Talks” to Acquire the Hot Microblogging Service
Google opens Jaiku source code
Report: Twitter Turns Down $500 Million Offer From Facebook

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