• Recently Written

  • What would Google want with Twitter?
  • One Billion Served
  • Day 1
  • I am Back
  • Sixteen a Day
  • Eloquence Matters
  • Clicks to Cliques
  • I have arrived?
  • Two companies that I will not do business with
  • Idea for New Obama Strategy: Follow the Money

• Categories

  • consumerism
  • Gadgets
  • Games
  • Gaming
  • Politics
  • Social Media
  • Travel
  • Trends
  • Uncategorized
  • Web
  • writing

• Archives

  • April 2009
  • January 2009
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008

• My Favorites

  • Alton Brown - All things that are good eats
  • Barack Obama - The next president of the US
  • Google App Engine - Run your website on Google’s infrastructure.
  • Great Speeches - MP3’s of the greatest speeches in recorded history.
  • Jamie Oliver - Will always be the Naked Chef
  • Mosso - The hosting cloud that serves this site.
  • Open Source Food - Best non-tech use of the open source idea
  • popurls - Often imitated, never surpassed.
  • The Original Cranky Geek - John Dvorak’s Personal Blog
  • URL Compressor - The shortest micro URL engine on the planet.

• Admin

  • Log in
  • Wordpress
  • XHTML

• Search

I think most of the coverage is missing the point on the value of a potential Google-Twitter deal. The base microblog technology is dead simple to recreate. My team created working Twitter clone for use inside the firewall in less than a month. A fully working and better performing microblog could be put on App Engine for peanuts. The idea that Arrington put forth yesterday that Twitter “holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet” misses the point. The real Keys that Twitter holds are the users.

Simply stated, Google learned their lesson with Google Video. They built a product that was just as good as YouTube, yet hardly anyone used it; the simple solution was to buy the users. Just like the YouTube deal, the only things Google needs from Twitter are the user base and the brand name. The biggest difference between the two deals is that I don’t think Google will want to take on the “fail whale” technology that twitter is running on; It wouldn’t surprise me if they already had a fully functional and integrated microblog platform ready to go on Google infrastructure with the same API, just waiting for this deal to be done. The deal would enable Google to instantly get back in the game with Facebook and leave Microsoft in the rear-view mirror.