Apple rumored to buy Twitter?

Opinion: Teh InterWeb is all-a-quiver over rumors that hip, fab and groovy Apple is set to pay 700 million bucks for hip, fab and groovy Twitter.

Twitter turned down a $500m plus shares offer from Facebook at the end of last year, but Apple could pay entirely in cash, in an offer Twitter would find very hard to refuse.

Exactly why Apple would be interested in a service that enables people to keep the world apprised of the last time they took a dump, or drank a skinny latte in less than 140 characters, remains a bit of a mystery.

Perhaps the answer lies in the iPhone – Apple would just love to sell more of these little suckers and Twitter is just the kind of inconsequential rubbish that iPhone users go for.

In hard business terms, Apple simply doesn’t care if it owns Twitter or not, not least due to the fact that the microblogging model is far from proven in business terms. No. What Apple wants is your money. And spending $700 million on Twitter to guarantee a few million more iPhone sales is just the kind of investment Cupertino would go for.

June 8 is the target date, by all accounts, when Apple’s worldwide developer conference opens in San Jose.

But having said all that, no doubt Oracle will prove everyone wrong and buy Twitter instead.