Google Buying Twitter? Not a Bad Idea

Vegas should forget the Super Bowl or March Madness, the real action is betting on what Twitter will pick for its revenue model.

Forbes lays down its wager by pointing out the vast amount of data that passes through the micro-blogging service each day.

Twitter is developing a range of analytics and metrics products and services built around the information contained in "tweets," the e-mail and text messages that pass through its platform. "We can measure the tweets," Twitter’s Kevin Thau says. "We’re trying to figure out what are the appropriate metrics around engagement and how to convey those."

There’s certainly a possibility that businesses might have an interest in the aggregated data that comes from Twitter’s stream of consciousness, but with free data already floating around the web (e.g. Google Trends) will companies really open their wallets and pay for it?

Maybe selling the data to individual businesses is out, but what about offering it to other services that sell, or make money from, web data.

TechCrunch points out just how much Twitter’s real-time data would compliment the relatively archaic content served up by Google’s search results. While Google recently gave up on its Twitter competitor Jaiku, it clearly found the space interesting enough to buy the company in the first place. And if Google’s purchase of YouTube serves as precedent, it’s not afraid to throw its own offering in the trash and buy the market-leader in the space.

Think about how much more useful Google would be if you could somehow get the real-time value of Twitter, but matched with Google’s powerful algorithm so we can make sense of what can sometimes be just a mass of incoherent ramblings. How cool would that be?

What wild, wacky, or sensible Twitter business models have you seen mentioned recently?