News has been swirling around the rumored Google-Twitter hook up. Seems like it's losing steam and may eventually just become a regular business/product development deal. I'd say the later makes more sense given that Twitter doesn't need to be bought and is just dipping its toes in the world of revenue generation. Google's got the advertisers, Twitter's got the inventory so it makes more sense for Twitter to remain independent and see if it can't make some of its own dough. They can always go back to testing the sell out waters in another year or so. Given their momentum and traffic growth, they won't be losing market value by waiting. Plus if they can rope Yahoo into acquisition discussions next year (when the stock should have hopefully gone up a little more), it could only help stir up the froth. Also, let's not forget that Microsoft might be interested at that point.

I'm watching PTI (Pardon the Interruption on ESPN) and one of the segments is about Twitter. The story is that guys like Chris Bosh (http://twitter.com/chrisbosh) and Shaq (http://twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ) actively use Twitter (Bosh has about 2,100 followers, Shaq has over 105,000!). Dan LeBatard and Tony Kornheiser are discussing whether more and more athletes will become active on Twitter. The fact that Twitter was mentioned by a bunch of older dudes on a sports show has demonstrated for me that Twitter now has crossed over to the mainstream. It's like when my mom mentioned that she was "Googling" a while back - that pretty much meant to me that Google had arrived.
 
Back to the show, Dan made a very interesting comment that with services like Twitter, sports reporters are now becoming less and less relevant. If an athlete can connect directly with the fans, do we really need the sports reporter in the locker room with a microphone? I'd say that sports reporters and especially sports journalists are still necessary. What these athletes do with Twitter only shows me what the athlete may be willing to share but that's only part of the story. It takes an investigative reporter or journalist to dig beyond that to uncover more truth or to provide interpretation and insightful commentary. Do you think A-Rod would have confessed to taking roids had a journalist not uncovered it? I think services like Twitter are a nice addition to the sports information stream but by far not the end all.

I'm reading the Techcrunch post re: Twitter and it's Series C round of $35M. Congrats to them. In reading the comments, I noticed there was a fair amount of hate re: why anyone would continue to fund a company that doesn't have a revenue generating strategy in place. That's a legit stance. Still, I don't have as much pessimism about Twitter than I do about say, Facebook. For one, Twitter hasn't unveiled its revenue generating products yet. For all we know, it could hit a monster homerun. Facebook on the other hand has made several attempts at generating revenue with some success (and some failures - Beacon anyone?). Still, I'll reserve judgement until after they roll out those proposed revenue generating products.
 
One comment in particular was from a guy named Nathan:

Useless is a bit much. The service is useful to millions of people who use it multiple times every day. The issue isn't the usefulness of the service, it's the fact that it doesn't generate revenue. A big difference. Also, it seems that Nathan is a little bitter that his revenue generating start-up can't get funding. On that point, I feel for him. Fundraising is not easy. You'd be lucky to get one second meeting out of ten first meetings with investors. We've been fundraising for about a month and had to hear a lot of no's before we got to the handful of promising second/third meetings we are entering into now. Our business, like Nathan's, is not that sexy though we do generate revenue and have very strong growth projections.
 
The analogy I like to use is this. Someone comes up to you and asks for a million dollars to open a couple of Denny's franchises. The person provides solid sales numbers, tons of historical data, etc. and tells you that you'll most likely make back your money in 3-5 years and then receive a nice 10% dividend each year. Then another person comes and tells you they need a million dollars to open a new concept high-end restaurant with a new chef who has worked under the best chefs in the country. Who would you fund? My answer would be the Denny's franchise, but that's because I'm not rich and like the stability of a safe investment. For investors who already have money, the idea of a nice solid investment throwing off 10% just doesn't excite them. They need the next billion dollar payout - the next YouTube, Yahoo, or Google. Otherwise, they'd just go buy bonds and commodities.

Om Malik writes in a post that Google is great at search but bad at investments (in reference to today's earnings release within which was mentioned a $1+ billion write down for bad investments). I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment and might even take it one step further. In regards to making money, does Google really do well in any field other than search? For the record, I use a lot of Google services like Search, GMail, Google Maps, and YouTube to name the big ones. I think these are all awesome services but they don't come near to making the huge profits that are synonymous with the Google cash machine (do any of these products even generate some profits?). It's not a knock on Google by any means. They have afforded themselves the right to roll out any product they want regardless of its profit generating capabilities. It just makes me wonder whether they'll be in the same boat as Microsoft someday - a company that never really figured out a way to generate huge profits from anything but desktop software. But hey, if I generated the profits that Google does from search and Microsoft does from desktop software, who really cares?

UPDATE:  To further prove that no one cares, Google is trading almost 8% higher as of 11am the next day.