Pat Phelan: Bits, bytes and telecomsA little bit of everything

Kara Swisher has the story of the year today
“When-twitter-met-facebook-the-acquisition-deal-that-fail-whaled”
If this is true and I have no reason to doubt the hyper-connected Kara does it reflect poorly on Facebook and their ridiculously inflated price tag of $15 billion.
This takes serious cahones by the Twitter team led by Evan Williams and suggests that they do have a monetization plan up to their sleeve.

“Top execs at both Facebook and Twitter were right then at the tail end of discussions, which were initiated by the privately-held Facebook in mid-October, about bringing the two together.
Those talks, sources on both sides said, are now over.
So why did the deal break down?
Well, as is usually the case, over price–was $500 million worth of Facebook stock actually worth $500 million?–and the typical concerns about integration and costs.
But, more important, it seems, was a feeling among Twitter investors and execs that the start-up should still take a shot at building its revenues–there are none right now–as well as it had done at building its growth”

To bring up the subject of SMS costs to the USA is a complete red herring as this can be done over email at zero cost and with the stellar growth of connected devices like the iPhone and G1 this makes no sense at all.
An exit even into Facebook stocks would be an exit in my opinion and tells me that the Twitter investors are around for the longer haul and maybe the even greater riches in Mountain View.