What if Google Would Have Bought Twitter “When They Could”?

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There’s no doubt that if Google would have bought Twitter back in the 160 characters social network’s early days that it would have done good for the search giant. According to Business Insider, Twitter was valued at $8 billion last fall, raising $800 million over the past year. That’s pretty good for a company that has no easy to see way of making money and no real advertising structure aside from featured tweets. If Google owned Twitter, that would just add $8 billion to the companies gold pot valuation. However, because Google top executives didn’t buy Twitter when it was cheap, now there will soon be some competition. Twitter says that they soon plan to file for IPO which means some serious competition for Google. Twitter isn’t small either, they actually received requests from the state department to stay online during the riots overseas. Twitter was planning to do maintenance that would bring Twitter down for two hours, and they suddenly realized just how much people rely on their service. I not only consider Twitter a social network, but a communication platform as well. Twitter has a very fast-moving stream to it and its hashtag feature makes conversation on Twitter with groups very fun and interactive. Let’s predict what Twitter might be like if Google acquired it.

Tweets in search
Just as we saw when Google+ was released, I think if Google bought Twitter we would be able to see certain highly popular tweets in a Google search when searching for a specific topic. Of course, this would be something that you would only see (and be able to turn off) if you were on Twitter. If you weren’t on Twitter you would most likely only see Twitter profiles in the search results.

No Google+
I think the whole reason Google created Google+ is because of the fact that they never acquired Twitter. However, Google had other social network like projects going on in the early years of Twitter. I’ve heard several people say that Google+ is a lot like Twitter and I can see that. It is simply a sharing and conversation platform that doesn’t move as fast as the Twitter feed, with better conversation and a wonderful notification system.

Picasa Integration
Google’s image service Picasa is still alive, and I think if Google bought Twitter they would have made this the official image client for Twitter similar to Twitpic which isn’t an official Twitter app, just an app using the API.

Bots Galore 
Twitter has a pretty good news service, and I think if Google bought Twitter they would have created a service within Twitter where you could create or follow bots that would tweet out news information you’re interested in. Twitter never did this, and that’s why people set up bots themselves for Twitter with services such as Yahoo Pipes.

Google never bought Twitter, and even if they wanted to it’s too late. $8 billion is a lot of money even for a company like Google. Now we have Google+ and Twitter instead of just Twitter as well. It will be interesting to see how Twitter plays out when they go public with their very small, usually unseen ad market. Facebook has a bigger ad market that Twitter, and at the time I write this post they are trading at $9 under what they originally opened at. Some days they are up, some days they are down.

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