Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is reporting that Google and Twitter are in some stage of acquisition talks — either early or late, depending on who you ask — for a sum well above the $230 million price venture capitalists placed on Twitter when they invested in February.

It would be a second Google payday for Twitter CEO Ev Williams, who sold Blogger to Google in 2003, a deal which proved lucrative after Google went public a year later. And he has the benefit of having negotiated a sale to Google before.

Williams's Twitter, which lets users post short updates about whatever thought crosses their minds, is being hailed by the Valley's groupthinking bloggers as a revolution in "real-time search." Much as a stopped clock is right twice a day, occasionally one finds some bit of timely news posted by a Twitter user. (It's hardly a threat to established newsgathering operations, because more often than not, what's posted on Twitter is just a link to some page on CNN.com or nytimes.com.)

The venture capitalists who sank tens of millions of dollars into Twitter, despite its lack of any sincere interest in making money, have cleverly talked up this "real-time" angle among journalists eager for a trend story. The notion of real-time anything is inherently appealing to the Ritalin addicts of the tech and media worlds, for whom instant gratification both takes too long and wastes 15 percent of a 140-character message. And that has gotten Google worried that it might be letting a rival grow in its own backyard.

Already, the buzz has translated into investments and hires for Twitter. It recently poached Google's top designer, Doug Bowman, and hired a computer scientist, Pankaj Gupta, whom Google and Facebook were wooing. Even though Google has laid off hundreds recently, it's still hiring engineers. One more reason to buy Twitter that boils down to pure shame: to plug an embarrassing brain drain.

And one last reason: To spare Twitter's executives the chore of talking about their nonbusiness. On Thursday's Colbert Report, cofounder Biz Stone had to go through a humiliating explanation of how Twitter is building "value" instead of "profit":

Since assuming leadership of the consumer web team, I started attending the legendary weekly UI review meeting. I did this both as a representative of the web group, and also to help keep my team on track with what Marissa and her team expected of us. By this point in my career I had worked with her many, many times, and I had been attending the review regularly for a couple of months. She had even shaken my hand once to thank me for launching a particularly big and difficult campaign.
One of the last times I sat in that meeting, as we were dispersing, she looked right at me and asked her assistant to "cut down on the number of guests - there are too many random people here." I knew then that despite all the work I had done for her team, she didn't recognize me at all. I had earned no influence. I stopped going to the reviews after that.
A few weeks later, after thinking about my experiences and opportunities there, I decided to resign.

Halsall then calls for a change in Google's "creative leadership" — a veiled way of asking for Mayer's head on a platter.

Her tale comes after Doug Bowman, Google's top designer, criticized Google's obsession with numbers in making design decisions, a strategy advanced by Mayer. Another former designer, Kevin Fox, now at a startup called FriendFeed, doesn't wholly agree with Bowman — but notes that Google's design group has "had a glass ceiling from the very beginning." That, too, seems like a veiled reference to Mayer's iron grip on the look and feel of Google's consumer Web products. It doesn't take a degree in visual design to notice a pattern here.

Bowman joined Google three years ago — too late, he now says. The company's engineers-first culture was firmly in place, meaning every decision had to be proven through exhaustive testing, rather than a reliance on a clear vision of Google's design. And in a backhanded slam at Google VP Marissa Mayer, the head of "user experience," he notes that top management in charge of design had not background in the field:

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.


Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

Exciting design problems, like those at Twitter? A source tells us that's where he's going, but Bowman hasn't confirmed that yet. (He promises to disclose his new employer in a followup blog post.)

Bowman adds that he "can't fault Google for this reliance on data," but "won't miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data." It's a microcosm of what's going wrong at Google: The rigorous culture of making every decision quantitative, every process algorithmic, results in a coldly efficient experience, with no room for the human quirkiness that makes sites like Flickr so appealing. It's hard to argue with Google's financial results. But who wants to work inside the bowels of a perfectly tuned machine? If Google runs by the numbers, it hardly needs humans. And that's why people like Bowman are leaving.

(Photo by gorriti)

Why is a designer switching teams such big news? Jason Fried, the influential founder of Web-software company 37signals, hailed Bowman's 2006 hire as Google's "best acquisition to date." Google even created a grand new title for him: "visual design lead." But now Bowman's leaving after less than three years.

People switch jobs for all kinds of reasons. And Bowman had to work for every designer's nightmare client, Google executive Marissa Mayer. But Bowman, a veteran of the industry who pioneered Web design at Wired (where we were briefly coworkers), is a telling barometer.

Earlier in this decade, in the midst of another downturn, Google was the black hole for Silicon Valley's most talented people. Two years ago, it was Facebook. Now Twitter — a revenueless startup with just 30 employees — is the startup with the pick of the litter.

Talent has always flowed this way in the Valley, drawn by money and hype and the shared belief that a small group of people can, through sheer force of all-night coding sessions, change the world. (Change the world, that is, from one in which they are poor to one in which they are rich.) Here's to Bowman keeping the dream — or delusion — alive.

(Photo via Fawny)