Talks over Facebook’s $500m stock offer for Twitter have broken down, partly because Facebook’s ‘paper value’ has probably dropped considerably in recent downturn. For the time being at least, any deal appears to be dead.
Twitter is the current Web darling, and there is a spate of third-party development going on to produce Twitter related apps and tools. Twitter’s owners probably believe that their tool has a mass of unexploited potential growth in it yet, and would be unwilling to hand that potential goldine on to someone else.
Having said that, Twitter still suffers from technical issues due to its rapid growth so don’t be surprised if a more ‘hands-off’ type deal is reached with soemone other than Facebook – the big G would almost certainly be interested in adding Twitter to their world domination stable.
Just a quick warning to people – Kaspersky Labs report that a Twitter profile has been used to distribute malware.
A profile image linked to a video of a Brazilian model, but in fact the link led to a malware download. Twitter have since removed the link but there is no indication that the exploit has been plugged as of yet.
If clicked, the link showed a window displaying progress of a download of a new version of Adobe Flash supposedly required to watch the video. It is actually a fake file labelled Adobe Flash. This is a Trojan downloader that proceeds to download malware files onto the infected computer, all of which are disguised as MP3 files.
This follows on from another ‘forced follow me’ exploit which is apparently still not fixed for Internet Explorer users.
More info : http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1640
I remember hearing about Twitter when it very first came out, like when nobody was using it and just thinking… that sounds completely pointless. It just seemed bizarre to me, I mean… why not just use MSN for quick messages and chats or if you actually need to send someone a message… Email.
I ignored it forever and it’s only recently I could start to see why some people like it I suppose. It’s very quick and you don’t need 100 chat boxes open, just quick, limited updates in which you can keep to a handful of people if you like. It’s nippy. So I just decided, before I wrote this post, to sign up.
I’m not overwhealmed by it to be honest and can’t really understand why some are supposedly obsessed with it. But I’m going to use it for a little while to give it a chance, I can see the potential for marketing though. Social marketing can be lucrative but I think inevitabely gets crushed by people over-adding friends etc. then not bothering to really keep up with anyone in particular.
Anyway, check me out on Twitter here 
