May 20, 2009 by Jenny Sanderson
Paying yet more lip-service to Twitter, co-founder Larry Page has today stated that Google is losing out to Twitter in terms of real time search. “People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it, I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis,” Page stated at Google’s Zeitgeist conference.
Later, even more sensationally, CEO, Eric Schmidt hinted that Google and Twitter could become partners in order to remedy this situation. The talk up to this point had been of a Google buy-out though the rocketing user numbers of Twitter appear to have put the social networking site’s price out of kilter with Google’s valuation and in their current buoyant post-Oprah mood Twitter is apparently unwilling to settle for less than they anticipated.
It could end up being just as well as a deal rather than a buyout actually makes a lot of sense. A partnership would mean that Twitter get to keep their autonomy and branding, which is apparently very successful and Google get a neat solution to their real time search issues, with no money having to change hands.
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