Why Google want to take over Twitter

The basic strategic analysis in this case breaks down like this:

1. Social is a potential threat to search. Thinking longterm, Facebook is extremely effective at capturing eyeballs in emerging markets that are mobile-first, and they will get better at this through strategic plays like Internet.org. To quote one report about Asian and African users: “It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook” (Source: Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet).

2. Google is unable to create a successful social product, so the alternative is to acquire one. The company has a pretty abysmal track record in creating viable social networking products. The dead pool of internally created products currently stands at Orkut, Google Buzz, and Google+. It's a pretty common meme in the Valley that Google does not “get social” products.

Even with their enormous amount of talent and capital, they can't get consumers to grok that “Google” is associated with things other than search. (Gmail does not count. No one under 40 thinks email is a social activity. That's for work and school.)

Related possibilities for acquisitions include messaging platforms (though Facebook already beat them to WhatsApp (product) acquisition), or other mobile-focused products like Snapchat. None of these are likely to be as attractive to Google right now.

To be clear, I think this is a major long shot. Twitter doesn't exactly look rosy as a foil to Facebook's dominance in the consumer social networking market. MAU growth has basically stalled out. Most normal people still don't understand the basic appeal or mechanics of Twitter.

Of course, given that Google is even less capable at finding product-market fit with a consumer social networking product than Twitter, it's a possibility that they're desperate enough. Whether it is actually a good idea would require a lot more analysis of financials and user data that I don't provide here.