Can someone please explain how twitter is worth 3 billion?
Why are they prepared to pay that? Maybe they know something you don't, like Twitter's business plans, their current revenue, project revenue growth, those sorts of things.
It's easy for people to say that Twitter has little-to-no value because they can't think of ways to make money out of it - but that only means that they shouldn't be in charge of Twitter, not that someone else couldn't turn a profit on it.
This is not that much money for half the 100Mtweets/day over a year... "Twitter to Sell 50% of All Tweets for $360k/Year Through Gnip" http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_to_sell_50_of_a...
Google in turn would be valuing it in terms of multiple assets: how much it would increase their search revenue, monetization opportunities if Twitter was in the Googleverse, employee acquisition, develoepr ecosystem, synergies with Android and Chrome, and competitive value vs. Facebook, Apple and whoever else they're concerned about.
So while on the one hand a $3B valuation is astonishing, it's certainly defensible.
It's certainly true though that it feels like a fragile valuation. I think the same's true for Facebook: there are plausible scenarios where they're worth $100B, and plausible scenarios where they're worth $10B. We shall see.
I think the valuation is partly in response to how ingrained the twitter brand is becoming in pop culture.
They're the most wonderful lavish invisible clothes I've ever seen.