Twitter Co-Founder: Maybe We're Google-y-Eyed, Maybe We Ain't

Google dominated blogs and Web discussion boards at the end of last week

But in the midst of the frenzy, which continued through the weekend, it's worth noting Twitter co-founder Biz Stone did update via the Twitter blog to suggest that, yes, Twitter talks to "other companies regularly," and Twitter's first goal was to retain its independence.

"Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we're just getting started," Stone wrote in a Friday blog post. "We've got just over thirty employees now and we're working out of a loft in San Francisco's SoMA neighborhood."

Stone said the same thing during an appearance on Stephen Colbert's "Colbert Nation" on Thursday night.

"We're recognizing a difference right now between profit and value," Stone told Colbert. "Right now, we're building value."

At the end of his Friday post, Stone links to Twitter's main Jobs page, which lists 15 open positions and states Twitter is "looking for the key people who will help take Twitter to the next level and create a company culture that is successful and satisfying for years to come. We value talent, creativity and a sense that anything is possible. We are well-funded and building a company to last."

So does Stone's post make the Google/Twitter tea leaves any easier to read? Not exactly. In the past few weeks, however, plenty of tech analysts and other observers have questioned Google or any tech giant with designs on a Twitter acquisition.

In one of the most pointed of all the research notes that came out since mid-March, one titled "Google: Forget Twitter" had Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay writing that if Google bought Twitter, it would be buying a "pre-business."

"Don't get us wrong—we like Twitter and we think the concept of sending short open standard messages reporting on your activities is actually much more fun and more valuable than it sounds," Lindsay wrote. "The problem is that Twitter falls into the broad category of new Internet businesses that are almost unmonetizable. Whoever buys it will likely have to operate it at a loss in perpetuity, or until the next cool web 2.0 social networking concept comes along and Twitter tweets no more. Sadly, this would not be the first time that a major Internet company had made a bad deal."

David Hornik, a Silicon valley venture capitalist, provided some perspective.

"They'll never not be talking," he said to CNET news. "It's neither in Twitter nor Google's interest to not be talking."

Has Google itself weighed in on any of this? Well, no: Mountain View isn't commenting. The most recent comments from Google boss Eric Schmidt on the subject came from a Charlie Rose interview last month.

"We're unlikely to buy anything in the short term," Schmidt told Rose, "partly because I think prices are still high."