Twitter and Google : A Match Made In Heaven?

Rumours that Google might be purchasing Twitter soonish sent virtual stocks of the micro-blogging website significantly up, with some commentators saying that it might well be the best thing to happen to Google and Twitter.

The news come a few hours after Twitter unveiled its discovery feature which seeks to make search a central part of its offerings, certainly more than Facebook or other social networking services. And this is a major differentiating feature.

Figures released by the IAB yesterday show that more than half of online advertising spend is in the paid-for search sector. Twitter and Google know that, what's more, twitter has raised approximately $92 million and in comparison Facebook (according to insidefacebook.com) has raised around $440 million since it was launched.

Google is known to cosy up pretty easily with would be competitors. It has an investment in AOL, was friendly with Yahoo and signed a major advertising agreement with Myspace even if the latter was a rival to Google's own Orkut.

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To make things even easier for Twitter, Google killed Jaiku earlier this year - the microblogging service is still available but is maintained by volunteer Google engineers in the spare time. Likewise, it killed Google videos to allow Youtube to thrive.

But the pressure is on Twitter rather than on Google to broker a deal. Google has the infrastructure, the financial clout and human resources to turn Twitter into a massive web-based instant messaging, real-time search environment that's even more addictive than Facebook.

Using Compete and Alexa data, we can guess that 10.5 million unique visitors go on the website and generate 270 page views during that period; that's 2.8 billion page views excluding mobile devices-to-twitter interaction. That's a lot of PVs and these figures double every quarter or so.

Our educated guess is that investors might want to get out of the game before it is too late. If Google loses interest in Twitter and decides to go alone - either relaunching Jaiku or adopting Laconi.ca, Twitter will feel the pain.

More on this later today. You can follow ITProPortal.com on Twitter @ http://www.twitter.com/itproportal.