News has spilt over about a failed acquisition of Twitter by Facebook. Kara Swisher of Boom Town tells us that Facebook offered $500 million of Facebook Stock (at Microsoft’s valuation) to acquire Twitter which it rejected. Reasons? The first of course of whether the $500 million of stock represented $500 million or a more realistic $150 million. And more importantly, Twitter execs’ belief that they can eventually come up with a revenue model and take advantage of their exponentially growing user base.

Despite Facebook’s application certification programme, it is far from solving its own revenue problem and picking up Twitter would mean picking up its costs too.

However, the biggest worry for Twitter users is its fit in the Facebook platform and network. The Twitter API is a lot less restrictive than Facebook’s which has allowed users to use the service in a wide variety of ways. Think Twibble, Tweetdeck, Twhirl and Twitterfox to start up with. Any curtailment of this is sure to piss off a lot of users.

Besides the way I see it, there is not a lot Facebook stands to gain from Twitter apart from its large user base. Updates and commenting is already part of the functionality. So I’d say good call by the folks at Twitter. Forget acquisitions and focus on your scaling and revenue issues and all will be fine and dandy.

Let’s face it, Facebook has become a hub of daily activity for a large number of people, including me. This is specially true for university where birthdays and socials are organised over Facebook and if you’re anywhere as obsessed as me about having an organised calendar, you would have noticed the lack of a true solution to have that information automatically imported in your calendar and more importantly mobile device. This is because most mobile phone sync solutions only allow you to sync one calendar to your phone and while you may be able get an internet calendar running in Outlook you can’t update it on your device. I tried copying event information from internet calendar to local calendar but that would mean doing it periodically and it beats the purpose.

Fortunately, there is a, tricky but working, solution to that problem. In this scenario I’m going to use Outlook, Google Calendar and a Nokia E90.

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It was this very month, in fact this very week of May when Facebook was opened up to my university among others in the UK. Judging from my profile ID (223400006) I’d like to think I was #6 to sign up. Facebook has changed immensely since, and not always for the good. From opening up to general public to releasing the Application Platform, an old school user (I’m not talking about me) wouldn’t recognise the Facebook he/she saw today from the one back then. However this isn’t a post to bitch about ‘features’ I dislike. Instead I’ll talk about where I see Facebook headed, or want to see it headed.

As it stands now, Facebook is pretty popular Social networking platform. I have all my friends on here and I can see what they have been upto in a variety of ways. Their photos, reading their walls, their notes (blog posts), events they are attending and most importantly status updates. I can find out common interests too by looking at their profile or the outlandish groups they join. Communication is done via public wall posts or Messaging, which Facebook hopes will replace email but more on that later.

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I tried Digsby earlier on in March and was quite impressed with it but since I’ve never really used a multitude of Instant messaging platforms I didn’t really care for it. I’m only on Google Talk and WLM/MSN Messenger and running those two clients was perfectly fine by me. However on May 1 Digsby announced support for Facebook chat. I strongly believe Facebook Chat has a strong potential of becoming the biggest IM provider as the approach of building IM around a social network makes more sense than the traditional approach of doing it the other way around. So this made me take the plunge and drop the GTalk client (sorry Google <3).

The feature list is really extensive so I’m not going to go through it all. I will go through some of the main ones though. Firstly, it has supposed for all major IM platforms( MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat). In addition you can configure multiple email accounts in the client, and that’s not just notification , it’s complete control (open, delete, forward, mark as read etc). Facebook stalkers enthusiasts will love the Social networking feature which lets you receive updates from Facebook (other social networks supported too). This can get pretty extensive actually, I ended up unsubscribing from that as it was an overload. There’s a lot more you can do with it, writing about it all will result in a really long boring post.

You can really customize the application and it’s appearance a great deal, right from buddy list to conversation window. The way I’ve set it up now is it connects to my Gtalk account, Facebook account, Twitter account and retrieves email from my two Gmail accounts. Still haven’t given up on MSN because believe it or not, I like the client. However should it exceed my bloat tolerance threshold I won’t have qualms about dumping it.

If nothing else, it’s a good enough client for Facebook Chat. Give it a spin. They have a new build as well.

http://www.digsby.com

After months of bickering, Microsoft and Yahoo did not tie the knot. The decision while celebrated by some, disappointed others, including Yahoo. Aw Yahoo I understand what is to be broken hearted.

Adding insult to injury is the news from WSJ reporting Microsoft’s bankers have informally approached Facebook over a possible acquisiton. Flashback time: Microsoft invested $240m for a 1.6% stake (which valued Facebook at $15bn) and was an all advertisement deal.

Knowing that, what Microsoft stands to gain from this deal is unimaginable. The affair with Yahoo was to try and build up a stronghold in the search and ad market (to compete with Google), and Facebook hasn’t (yet) been a strong ad platform as one would’ve thought it out to be. In fact, it is yet to present a sustainable source of revenue (1$ gifts can’t do it all). And if Microsoft has already locked up the pageviews, where do they go from there ?

I have to say as much as I love and respect Microsoft, Livebook doesn’t sound appealing to me.

I guess we’ll only have to see if Microsoft updates it’s relationship status from ‘It’s complicated’ to ‘In a relationship’, and at what point will Yahoo update its ‘Looking for’ ?