Buy Twitter in just $500 million

Is Google going to buy Twitter! No, Facebook's going to buy it! Or Yahoo--oh, give me a break, they all can't afford it anymore. The hottest news is that Apple has been looking at buying Twitter, too.

Yes, Apple. It's a hardware company that really only markets and hypes up software as a means to sell more hardware--like how iTunes really exists to sell iPods--and yet apparently it wants to buy Twitter. I'm not sure Twitter could convince me to buy any hardware, except maybe a water balloon to carry around in the hopes that maybe I could lob it at annoyingly Twitter-happy Ashton Kutcher.

You know what? If I had $500 million in cash lying around, I'd look into buying Twitter, too. I'd also buy a flying car. Twitter happens to be, oh, the hottest start-up in the digital-media business right now, so it'd probably be a good investment. But it's also buzzworthy as a form of communication and news delivery--and with the iPhone, it's completely understandable that Apple would be interested in this sort of property. A BusinessWeek report highlights this: Twitter apps are hot on the iPhone, it'd be a cheap buy for Apple--so why not? It ends on a rather smart note, that perhaps Apple ought to invest in Twitter, not buy it.

Why does this sound so familiar? Maybe because we've heard it all before. Two years ago, Google and Microsoft and Yahoo and News Corp. and probably several Abu Dhabi oil billionaires were reportedly in the running to buy Digg, back when it was on the top of Silicon Valley's start-up heap. It was almost a done deal. And again. And again. And none of that has happened yet.