Today’s best online rumor was Twitter turning down a $500 million acquisition by Facebook. In an economy as terrible as ours, this is especially interesting news.
If you don’t know what Twitter is and you are reading this, you are my mother or my oldest sister (and the latter has an iPhone, so she might). If you don’t know what Facebook is, then you are a terrorist at a library in some foreign country who happened to find my blog either because I use variations on the word “terror” frequently or because of the bestiality post.
Some interesting points about this right off the bat:
1.) Twitter makes no money. Yes, this is common knowledge, but really, think about this. You have a company that makes no money and someone offers you $10, let alone $500,000,000.
2.) Apparently Mark Zuckerberg is losing his mind because Twitter is in 2008 what Facebook was in 2007 and what MySpace was before, and so on.
3.) The major dispute is the money involved, since it involves stock: Twitter doesn’t think Facebook is as valuable as Facebook thinks Facebook is. So Facebook stock means shit to a company that regardless is still currently MAKING ZERO DOLLARS.
Just these facts lead me to a variety of possible conclusions:
A.) Twitter is fucking crazy.
B.) Facebook is fucking crazy.
C.) Twitter is run by psychic cyber ninjas and galactic pirates born from the same cosmic mother that produced Steve Jobs, Tupac, Pablo Escobar, and Michael Bay’s fascination with hot babes and blowing things up.
D.) No one gives a fuck about what my opinion is.
After thinking about it for several seconds, I’m going with C, though D is probably the most accurate.
Twitter is, to borrow the vernacular of the kids, thuggish. This, for the moment, is punk rock. Yes, Twitter will learn how to make money, and they’ll probably sell out to the highest bidder. But for the time being, Twitter is what you thought the Sex Pistols were in ‘77. They are the French kids in the streets in ‘68.
Music used to be the way to rebel. That officially died after Nevermind went platinum, though it was truthfully dead years before that. The way to rebel now is technology. Got an idea? Don’t talk about it, just do it. If it’s that great, you won’t need to market it. Great ideas spread like disease, and disease does not need to convince people. Disease does not sell itself to others; it transfers itself regardless of permission, dollar value, or overt advertising. The Twitter meme, around since early 2006 at least, started multiplying like crazy during the summer of 2008. It multiplied so fast that it infected the minds running the second largest social network in the world, a network itself that has been around for under 5 years.
The power of no is not that you disagree with the question, but you disagree with the question in principle. For instance: do you want to clean the bathroom? No. Why, because it’s not dirty? No, because that is not what I do.
I don’t know what they call it in the business world, but in my world, what Twitter said to Facebook was this:
Get fucked.
Hoo ha.