[jasonlbaptiste]

I still dont know what to make of these deals. On the one hand: Twitter brought in good revenue. This is smart and shows the value in their data.

On the other hand: I personally feel Twitter's real value to an acquirer like MSFT or GOOG is the data. The rest of it is kind of gravy and it's only there to provide the data (ie- you need people posting things in order to have the search data). In short, GOOG basically got the value they needed out of Twitter for a measly 25 million dollars. Why would they ever acquire them at what's sure to be a number at least 40x that amount?... Except to make sure someone else doesn't hence cutting off their access to the data.