I am sure by now you have heard the rumors, Sources: Google In Late Stage Talks To Acquire Twitter (Updated).
Google should take a lesson from the IM wars and build their own microblogging platform. By building a microblogging platform from the ground up, it could be easily integrated into existing services, gmail, gtalk and Google Apps. By taking advantage of the current open microblogging efforts they could make use of, and give back to the open source community. It could be tightly coupled to services like Picassa, BlogSpot, Google Groups and Google Latitude.
Google will spend more than $250 million to acquire Twitter’s users. They could easily acquire these users, especially the valuable commercial ones, simply by featuring their microblogging search on the front page of Google.
Breaking the monopoly on microblogging and promoting an interoperable solution would be good for everybody except Twitter. Twitter could even benefit. Instead of selling out it could strive to become a provider of interoperable microblogging software rather than being a provider a closed service.
But you say, Google already had their own microblogging platform, Jaiku. They abandoned it and open sourced it. I can’t imagine that Google put anywhere close to $250 million into Jaiku. Of course, Google could certainly purchase Twitter and then seamlessly transfer all of the users to Jaiku. Then we could have the best of both worlds.