Step one: Slowly destroy the Suggested User List, a list of Twitter's favorite websites which is used to populate the accounts of new users. CEO Evan Williams now says ""I desperately want to kill it or evolve it," according to Business Insider. A few weeks ago, Williams said, "we don't think it's our job to editorialize" through the list, according to NYU professor Jay Rosen.

Indeed, the list gave the microblogging startup tremendous unchecked power to instantly bestow large audiences on various Twitter publishers, yet it was assembled somewhat haphazardly, in a process that involved a "gut check" with "a couple folks" at Twitter Inc. The company reportedly and apparently removed TechCrunch publisher Mike Arrington from the list after, over Twitter's loud objections, he published internal Twitter documents obtained from a hacker. TechCrunch appears to have since been restored to the list; the below chart from TwitterCount shows the long fallow period in Twitter follower growth for TechCrunch when it was apparently out of Twitter's favor:

Step two: Provide search data to rivals. The value in Twitter is in its real time "fire hose" of tweet data. But the company has guarded that data jealously, providing it to only some companies who request it, and then often at a cost of thousands of dollars per month. But Twitter is now nearing a deal to finally sell access to its "full feed" to Microsoft for the Bing search engine, reports Kara Swisher of All Things D. The company is also believed to have been in talks with Google for a similar deal. Sharing with such large competitors is quite a bit of letting go — albeit with financial compensation — for a company that has treated its real-time content feed as a major strategic asset.

It would appear that Twitter is learning a lesson crucial to all sorts of small businesses: if you want to be successful at something, you have to give up on being successful at everything. One would think a company founded on tiny, 140-character status updates would have learned the benefits of limits much sooner.

(Pic: Williams, earlier this month, by Bruno Pin.)

Businessweek's Tom Lowry reports:

But knowledgeable sources say that Bloomberg's cash offer is in the $2 million to $5 million range and that it has agreed to assume liabilities, including potential severance payments. It remains to be seen how much of the magazine's 400-plus staff Bloomberg plans to cut, but reports of a planned scorched earth campaign are overblown, say sources.

Indeed, our own sources also shot down a report earlier this week that Bloomberg had plans to dump virtually the entire staff at BW. Which is not to say that the magazine's employees should feel safe; it's still early in the process, but Bloomberg is reportedly considering a range of options including merging its own website with Bloomberg's. All signs point to probably layoffs at BW out of necessity, but Bloomberg is almost certainly not going to be as ruthless in cutbacks as a more financially-strapped buyer would have been.

Several million for the magazine is not so bad, by today's standards. By the standards of, say, five years ago, it's awful.

Reuters says both Murdoch and Liberty Media's John Malone are sniffing around the 20 percent stake in NBC Universal that Vivendi is prepared to sell, but neither man has actually approached NBC Universal owner GE about a deal. As much as we'd love to imagine MSNBC under Murdoch's gentle-but-firm leadership, here's why it's not going to happen:

1. The report of Murdoch's interest comes via CNBC, which is the preferred in-house avenue for GE getting its messages out there on this deal. So it's almost certainly just a way for GE to keep pressure on Comcast and let them know that it has other options.

2. The FCC would blow a gasket. News Corp. already owns two television stations in nine markets, and is maxed out in terms of how many the FCC will let him own. It's unclear to us whether a minority stake in NBC Universal would trigger the FCC's limits on ownership and require Murdoch to sell off some of his assets in order to satisfy regulators, but the anti-trust implications of one television, cable, and movie giant owning a significant stake of another television, cable, and movie giant—especially when radical leftists control the White House and the Justice Department—make it a far stretch.

3. The Comcast purchase is a done deal, because the mellifluously named prognosticator Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's computer has ordained that it will happen. Bueno de Mesquita, whom the CIA hires to predict the future using Microsoft Excel and has a purported 90 percent accuracy rate, was asked by the Wall Street Journal's Dennis K. Berman to weigh in on the acquisition, and he says it will happen, based on what Berman told him about the players' intentions:

For the Comcast-NBCU game, I provided Dr. Bueno de Mesquita a crude approximation of the positions of the dozen parties most likely to influence a deal.

[snip]

Of course, these were rough estimates done on the fly. As Dr. Bueno de Mesquita reminded me, my evaluations could be flawed. His work was done over a weekend, which may influence the quality of the results. Most assignments can take three weeks, at an opening price of $50,000.

Oh, OK. That settles it then.

Various startups, we're told, have already been able to buy access (for thousands of dollars, not the millions Google or Microsoft would have to pay) to tweets. Twitter is in "advanced talks" with both those companies to sell access to a full feed of tweet data for use in the companies' search engines, according to Kara Swisher at All Things D. Such a feed would presumably include all new tweets as they are posted along with public data on favorites and who is following whom.

Thought they haven't widely publicized the practice, Twitter is already in the business of selling access to its "firehose" of public data, according to a source close to one customer of the service. Twitter typically charges between $1,500 and $3,000 per month for such access, sometimes for a limited subset, this person said.

Then again, a typical customer until now has been a relatively small startup company with little revenue, utterly dependent on the Twitter ecosystem. Google and Microsoft are more fearsome competitors, with much deeper pockets. Google CEO Eric Schmidt just this past March called Twitter a "poor man's email system," and his company recently added real-time features to its GMail product, making it more Twitter like.

Of course, working with tech behemoths has its benefits, starting with cold hard cash. Swisher said deals on the table include payments of "several million dollars to Twitter." The company could also try and negotiate a cut of the advertising sales accompanying its results.

But the biggest benefit would be to reignite Twitter's growth, which appeared to stagnate over the summer. A company with a $1 billion valuation and little revenue lives and dies by its future promise. And a surge of search engine traffic could make that future look significantly brighter. Assuming, that is, that there's anything worth finding in the 140-character mental ejaculations of narcissists, celebrities and desk jockeys.

(Pic: Twitter co-founder Evan Williams with Google co-founder Larry Page, Williams' former boss, at industry event Foo Camp in 2007. By Scott Beale.)

The story's murky: Citing two sources, The Wrap reported that a deal to purchase NBC Universal—which owns Universal Studios, the USA Network, Bravo, MSNBC, NBC, and a bunch of other stuff—from General Electric "had already been completed at a purchase price of $35 billion." GE has been rumored to be interested in selling NBC for ages, and Vivendi's reported intent to exercise its option to sell its 20 percent stake in the company this year could be a motivating factor for getting a deal done. Comcast, which owns cable and internet pipes but not much of the stuff that goes through them, has always wanted to own a big content company, and made a failed pass at Disney five years ago. GE makes engines and microwaves, so it never made much sense for them to own a network and studio.

But Comcast has attempted to knock the story down, saying "the report that Comcast has a deal to acquire NBC Universal is inaccurate." And while GE has officially remained silent, CNBC—which Nikki Finke suspects is acting as a mouthpiece for its corporate parent—is pouring cold water on the report as well. But NBC Universal's bullet-headed, upward-failing chief Jeff Zucker sent out a compay-wide e-mail today that took pains not to shoot the story down, saying, helpfully, "there are a number of possible things that could happen." The New York Times says that, Comcast's carefully calibrated denial notwithstanding, it is just one of many companies looking at buying Vivendi's stake in NBC Universal, but not the whole company. Billions of dollars are at stake, so you can be fairly confident that everybody is lying.

But what happens if Comcast does buy the whole hog outright? Here are a couple of potential ramifications:

Tina Fey Is Screwed:
The primary comic engine of 30 Rock is the notion of a television network being run by a cultish global microwave conglomerate. Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast, is a mild-mannered squash champion who lives in Philadelphia. They could get a good story arc out of the sale, but in the end, what's so funny about a show-runner clashing with cable executive? We suppose they could just pretend it didn't happen, but it's been funny because it's been true!

Bill O'Reilly is Screwed:
Ruh-roh. The hysterical crusade against GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt for personally helping Iran build a nuclear warhead sort of lacks urgency when it's not a proxy war against Keith Olbermann and MSNBC. If GE fully divests and Comcast takes over, O'Reilly loses his favorite target to lie about. Maybe Comcast gives free cable to ACORN, or something?

Jeff Zucker is Probably Not Screwed Because He Always Gets Away With It
Jeff Zucker, who personally oversaw the dismantling of one of the greatest television brands in history from the home of Seinfeld and Friends to the home of the Jay Leno Comedy Hour, should have been fired, repeatedly, years ago. But he somehow persists, and even though we'd like to speculate that Comcast's new management would seek a shake-up in order to more closely integrate NBC Universal's content into Comcast's delivery system, we won't because the guy always wins.

Other than that, NBC Universal would have to get used to having an interested, involved corporate parent that thinks it knows something about the entertainment business. Its status as the red-headed stepchild at GE afforded it some independence—GE didn't care much as long as NBC made the numbers. Comcast, on the other hand, is in the business of delivering entertainment, and probably has some ideas on how to make it. It would also of course seek to sell Universal Studio's film library via its On Demand service, and would likely try to find a way to sell all of NBC Universal's content through its internet service.

One significant area where the two companies overlap is ad sales: Right now if you're a Comcast subscriber watching USA Network, you're seeing a mix of ads sold by NBC Universal and Comcast. If a deal is completed, Comcast would in effect own all the cable ad inventory on its cable properties. And in local markets, Comcast now competes with NBC's owned-and-operated stations—they want the local car wash to buy Comcast's cable spots, not the NBC station's local news spots. That competition would go away.

Still, Comcast's shareholders aren't reacting well to speculation about the deal: It's stock is down 6% right now. And the Wall Street Journal's Martin Peers spells out why:

But there's little evidence that owning both content and distribution brings strategic value. Time Warner, in fact, only this year split its cable systems from its vast content operations. In Comcast's case, it's tough to see that having more MGM movies on demand has helped Comcast slow the inroads that phone companies have been making into its video business. And there are surely cheaper ways to prevent exclusive deals by rivals than to spend billions on an equity stake.

The magazine is currently run by Linda Johnson Rice, the daughter of founder John H. Johnson and a friend of the Obama family. Revenue is down 32% in the first half of 2009—which is worse than other magazines are faring—and Roberts says Rice has reached out to Time Warner, Viacom, and privately held firms to take it over or buy a piece of it.

Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom (pictured) appeared to have it made before the computer wizardly was allegedly stolen. They had eBay, to whom they sold their internet phone-call service in 2005, on the ropes. The online auction company was trying to sell Skype, but Friis and Zennstrom's barrage of software-licensing and copyright lawsuits against eBay scared off potential buyers like Google. eBay, it seemed, would be forced to accept Friis and Zennstrom's own lowball offer to buy back Skype.

Then a consortium of private finance companies swooped in with an offer — ultimately accepted — valued at a cool $2.8 billion. It just so happened that one of the buyers, Index Ventures, employs a guy named Mike Volpi, who used to work for the Skype founders. One of Volpi's tasks for Friis and Zennstrom, according to their suit (embedded below), was to learn how to replace the "Global Index" software code at the heart of their various internet communications software, including Skype. Being able to remove this software would potentially moot many of Friis and Zennstrom's Skype lawsuits, thus making Skype much more valuable to its owner — the company Volpi now works for.

Friis and Zennstrom are alleging that ex-employee Volpi stole secrets from them, and breached his fiduciary duty as chairman of one of their companies, online video company Joost. In so doing, they are not only kicking off an epic, $2 billion nerdfight, they are also cementing their reputations as among the most litigious entrepreneurs in tech. In addition to suing eBay in both U.S. and British courts, and Volpi, they've also filed three separate lawsuits against the investment banker who represented them in their sale of Skype, according to the New York Times.

For a couple of guys whose product is revolutionizing global communication, Friis and Zennstrom have a distinctly old-fashioned way of sending a message.

Joost lawsuit

Coverage elsewhere: VentureBeat, TechCrunch

(Top pic by Steve Jurvetson)

Grown, that is, in the eyes of Silicon Valley's venture capitalists, slaves to the technology fashions for which Twitter is the leading model: real-time, micro, iPhone friendly and acquisition bait for Google. Twitter might say it's in this for the long haul — someone is spreading word the company has $30 million, or most of its last funding round, sitting in a bank account — but the company has proven far more adept at finessing moneyed suitors than in groping for reliable revenue streams.

Twitter's trend hopping founders, whose project management company begat their blogging company which led to their podcasting company which begat Twitter, seem more likely to seize on the easy exit of the former rather than the long grind of the latter.

Especially when, as these charts of their past investment rounds show, they're so very good at jacking up their price:

(Top pic: Twitter co-founders Biz Stone, left, and Evan Williams. By Joi Ito.)

In an historic breakthrough bringing us one step closer to the moment when all media folds in on itself and swallows the universe, Fox TV has announced plans to develop the website, "Texts From Last Night" into a TV series.

The website invites people to share "the text messages you shouldn't have sent last night," streaming classics of modern literature such as, "Do you remember peeing on the wall and then yelling at us to stop looking at your dick?" — which will no doubt form the basis of the pilot episode's B-plot.

The Variety story reveals the writer, "will loosely base the show's characters and plot on the whole idea of racy — and sometimes embarrassing — communication, particularly among the twentysomething set."

iLike became something of an icon for a certain class of startup: Built on social networks, fast-growing, unprofitable, advertising supported. The company's impending sale to MySpace at a fire-sale price could hardly be a bigger wakeup call to these fellow makers of software "widgets."

The company was once valued at $53 million, back when Ticketmaster bought a 25 percent stake in late 2006, according to the Seattle Times. iLike amassed a total of $17 million from Ticketmaster and other investors like Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and former AOL exec Bob Pittman. Now it's negotiating to sell for just $19.5 million, All Things D reports, and $6 million of that is contingent on retaining certain employees in coming months.

It's quite comedown. But it's easy to see how iLike became a media darling and a hero to other makers of widgets. In the late spring of 2007, iLike ported its music recommendation service to Facebook, and in the process spiked its user base dramatically, to 15 million from 3 million over six months. In one week just after the Facebook launch, four venture capitalists asked CEO Ali Partovi (pictured) to lunch, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported; the company reportedly added close to 200 servers over the course of the summer.

After retaining insidery Silicon Valley flack Brooke Hammerling, iLike saw its praises sung widely in the media (emphasis added):

• Wall Street Journal, June 2007: "'Somebody's going to end up being the Facebook music service,' [co-founder Hadi Partovi] says. 'It's either going to be us, in which case we're made, or it's not.'" (By the time Patrovie gave this retrospective quote, iLike was by far the dominant music service on Facebook.)
• Billboard, July 2007: "The smart money says someone will acquire iLike, and soon. The company's social media discovery capabilities are a natural extension to any digital music service, particularly iTunes."
  
• BusinessWeek, July 2007:"'Widgets are a fundamentally important idea,' says Vinod Khosla... who has invested in two widget makers, Slide and iLike. 'I believe it has the potential to create big billion-dollar winners.'"
• Forbes, October 2007: "Says Khosla [Ventures]'s David Weiden: 'Widgets are the next kind of media network.'"
• USA Today, November 2007: "The company... has become an overnight sensation... Dave McClure, an angel investor in Silicon Valley, wouldn't be shocked if iLike... and others eventually go public."

Revenue was presumably slow in coming, though, because by fall of the following year iLike was said to be trying to sell itself and Ticketmaster wrote off half the value of its investment. Now investors are basically trying to break even with the MySpace sale. The music and advertising businesses have their own unique problems, but startups in other hot sectors, like iPhone apps, should beware: The excitement can dissipate as quickly as it inflates.

(Pic: Niall Kennedy)

The j-school graduate (pictured) is on a mission to save journalism, and his venture, EveryBlock, was in turn funded to the tune of $1.1 million by a grant from the philanthropic Knight Founation, which was hoping Holovaty would "make it easy for people to learn more about life around them." After two years, Holovaty open sourced his code and had accumulated a daily audience estimated at 14,000.

That's not good enough, says CUNY assistant professor Christopher Anderson, who writes that MSNBC has skimmed off the value of a project "developed by common labor;" Anderson is upset in part because it's not clear whether EveryBlock's code will remain openly available. NYU Local publisher Cody Brown has called for more transparency around the deal.

These sorts of critiques would be unimaginable around an acquisition involving privately held companies funded by stock and venture capital. But they're perfectly predictable when nonprofit money and promises of public benefit are involved. The Knight Foundation has already been through it once, with MTV.

America's newspapers should remember these headaches; as they seek government favors and mull nonprofit status, they'll find they have as much to learn from Holovaty's business story as from his technology.

(Disclosure: I applied for, and ultimately did not receive, a Knight Foundation grant one year after Holovaty.)

(Pic: Matt Biddulph)

From left to right are Facebook's Vaughn Smith, FriendFeed co-founder Jim Norris, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor. But the winner is clearly the guy on the far right, Mark Zuckerberg: if the Facebook CEO was the one dropping $50 million in this situation, that only made him more entitled, under Silicon Valley social mores, to dressing in shorts without socks. Let's just hope he never uploads pictures of a multi-billion-dollar transaction; it's a good bet a Speedo would be involved.

For comparative purposes, this is what a merger looks like in New York, with an old media company involved:

UPDATE: When Patricia Handschiegel sold StyleDiary in 2007, she snapped a decidedly unglamorous picture of herself at the end of the closing, when the fashionista found herself clad in a t-shirt, her hair pulled back. "This shit makes you humble," she told us at the time. Indeed!

(Top pic by FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit; bottom pic by Getty Images)

FriendFeed was, at one point, the darling of Silicon Valley; when one well-known blogger and database engineer left Yahoo last year, he publicly declared he'd rather work at FriendFeed than at Twitter. And no wonder: FriendFeed let Valley A-listers trade a wide array personal trivia from multiple services faster and faster, sating a deep hunger for narcissistic minutiae.

But if the rapid growth of Twitter over the past year has proven anything, it's that people outside of Silicon Valley are happy to source their trivia from a single, simple service, rather than from an aggregator like FriendFeed. Which is why we said more than a year ago that the latter's features were destined, one way or another, to be absorbed into Facebook.

Having invented GMail and Google AdSense, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Bucheit (pictured) will no doubt see his reputation burnished by successfully selling off his latest initiative; AllThingsD quotes a venture capitalist estimate of $50 million in cash and stock. But selling now highlights the limits of even that considerable accomplishment.

(Pic: Thomas Hawk)

The most likely scenario is presaged by the logo above, used by the two companies on a website about their deal: Yahoo as a division of Microsoft. For 10 years, Microsoft will power Yahoo searches, while Yahoo will sell the ads. Assuming Yahoo can grow and remain viable — a big if — Microsoft will have every incentive to buy the company at the end of the deal, and Yahoo will be heavily motivated to sell. Microsoft will want to retain Yahoo's traffic and sales force; Yahoo will be loathe to swap out the search technology behind all its sites.

Alternatively, Yahoo continues to flail. Under that scenario, Microsoft's Bing search engine will at least be able to exploit Yahoo just as Google once did; Yahoo gave Google crucial revenue and visibility early in its growth, and will give a similar boost to Bing. At the end of 10 years, if Yahoo is still around, Microsoft will simply walk away, leaving Yahoo to crawl into a corner and die.

In any case, it's fun to see Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, no doubt mindful of the need to clear antitrust regulators, finally acknowledge Google's power over her company. In a new video, she says this deal gives Microsoft and Yahoo "the scale necessary to compete against Google, which dominates the market with 70% of all search." Barely two months ago, she bit off a CNBC reporter's head for saying basically the same thing. Compare/conrast in the video at left. There's no denying Google's power now; indeed, it's the main rationale for the deal.

The pact will be announced within 24 hours, reporter Kara Swisher writes. It's been a long time coming. Given the two companies' stock performance (see chart below), and the level of, uh, charisma their CEOs posses, it's no wonder it took this long to screw up the courage to take on Google together. Should be entertaining to watch.

Diller will play sugar daddy to Notional; the IAC chairman will fold it into his ConnectedVentrues division, alongside CollegeHumor.com. The video content will be similar — cheap to make, zeitgeisty — but on television proper rather than the Web. Read: Potentially more lucrative. Reports PaidContent:

The focus will be unscripted programming, broader than comedy aimed at young males that they have been known for, and will include all genres.

Van Veen will report directy to Diller. The elder mogul has run Paramount, Fox and USA Broadcasting and no doubt relishes the chance to bestow his knowledge on an adoring young acolyte. One imagines Diller might become something of a father to Van Veen. Or perhaps more like a stepfather.

(Pic: Van Veen, by Nick Gray)

Bezos' video, above, was directed not at the press or even customers but at Zappos employees, who Bezos presumably wants to keep firmly in place through the acquisition and integration of the company. The CEO of Zappos, meanwhile, did his talking on the company blog.

Bezos cut out the middleman — the press, in this case — big time. And why not? Instead of having to answer boring financial questions, Bezos got to pontificate on Amazon's history, ostensible focus on its customers, and on his management philosophy. The manic laugher would never have been able to sermonize like this in the Wall Street Journal.

UPDATE: And of course there's a downside, which is being mocked by the likes of Fast Company's David Lidsky. Lidsky's funny satirical liveblog of Bezos' video is here.

A tipster in contact with the company says employees have been told the company will provide them with more information on the purported deal talks on the 20th. As traumatic as an acquisition can be, many on the editorial side would no doubt be relieved to work for a buyer ready to abandon Onion management's recent orders to pander to advertisers in order to stave off further financial losses.

If you know anything else about Monday's meeting, please clue us in.