New owner for Twitter soon?

US media giant Disney voiced its interest in acquiring Twitter, Bloomberg confirmed Tuesday. There's a personal link between the two companies: Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is also on Disney's supervisory board.

Speculation about Twitter changing hands already mounted last Friday when media reports said Salesforce.com and Google were also eying the networking service.

A deal is by no means certain, though, in light of Twitter's uncertain financial prospects and steep price tag. Although the company has never logged an annual profit, its market value is more than $16 billion (14.2 billion euros) and is rising further with talk of a sale driving the stock up.

Change of function

If sold, Twitter may end up heading in one of several distinctly different directions, depending on who will pay for it.

Disney for instance might see Twitter as a way to expand the reach of its sports and entertainment programming.

Salesforce.com for its part will want to turn the focus to customer service communications and mining Twitter's database of tweets for business intelligence, while Google would likely be most interested in the social and news dimension of the service.

hg/jd (AFP, Reuters)