If a wealthy corporation were to buy or even just 'sponsor' twitter, it would probably be worth subsidising just for the good-will effect on their reputation. Especially if they did so as it was being forced into charging.
DejaNews was a company that held the most comprehensive archive of discussions on Usenet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet) in the world at that time. Usenet was where public discussions happened online before Web forums, so that database represented an important chunk of early Internet history.
Deja had hoped to turn that database into a monetizable resource, but the bursting of the dot-com bubble ended that dream, and people started worrying that when Deja folded its Usenet archive might be lost forever. So Google stepped in and bought Deja to ensure that its archives would be held by someone who hadn't been crushed by the market collapse. Deja's archives eventually formed the basis of the product that became Google Groups.
There wasn't a lot of business logic to the acquisition; Usenet had been in decline for years by the time Deja sank, so if Google was only interested in a discussion product the Usenet archive wasn't a must-have. Buying Deja was more about saving a key piece of Net history (and putting it under the Google logo) than it was about financial prudence.
Of course, all this was in 2001, before Google went public. Private companies can make charitable gestures like this much more easily than public ones can.
Google would probably consider that if the price were right. They can afford to run Twitter for a while at break-even or a loss, like they did with Gmail or Youtube. It may not be as good a business as Youtube, but for them it would be a nice-to-have like Gmail.
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If a wealthy corporation were to buy or even just 'sponsor' twitter, it would probably be worth subsidising just for the good-will effect on their reputation. Especially if they did so as it was being forced into charging.
Google actually did something exactly like this early in their corporate existence, when they bought DejaNews in 2001 (see http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2001/02/google-acquires-usen...).
DejaNews was a company that held the most comprehensive archive of discussions on Usenet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet) in the world at that time. Usenet was where public discussions happened online before Web forums, so that database represented an important chunk of early Internet history.
Deja had hoped to turn that database into a monetizable resource, but the bursting of the dot-com bubble ended that dream, and people started worrying that when Deja folded its Usenet archive might be lost forever. So Google stepped in and bought Deja to ensure that its archives would be held by someone who hadn't been crushed by the market collapse. Deja's archives eventually formed the basis of the product that became Google Groups.
There wasn't a lot of business logic to the acquisition; Usenet had been in decline for years by the time Deja sank, so if Google was only interested in a discussion product the Usenet archive wasn't a must-have. Buying Deja was more about saving a key piece of Net history (and putting it under the Google logo) than it was about financial prudence.
Of course, all this was in 2001, before Google went public. Private companies can make charitable gestures like this much more easily than public ones can.
Google would probably consider that if the price were right. They can afford to run Twitter for a while at break-even or a loss, like they did with Gmail or Youtube. It may not be as good a business as Youtube, but for them it would be a nice-to-have like Gmail.