Why does it make sense for Salesforce to buy Twitter

Amid the rumours that the micro-blogging site Twitter may be up for sale to Google and Cloud computing company Salesforce, a top executive from Salesforce has tweeted why it makes sense to buy Twitter.

"Why @twitter? 1 personal learning network, 2 the best realtime, context rich news, 3 democratize intelligence, 4 great place to promote others," tweeted Vala Afshar, Salesforce's "chief digital evangelist," on Friday.

Afshar, however, added that "he was tweeting a personal opinion and not confirming today's rumours that Salesforce is interested in acquiring Twitter," Wired.com reported on Saturday.

Salesforce, which earlier tried to acquire LinkedIn (which Microsoft eventually bought), is vying for a social networking platform in its kitty for long.

The company, "which reached $6 billion in annual revenue faster than any other enterprise software company", offers customer service software, market research tools, email marketing systems and other products and several of them already use social media.

Google, on the other hand, has experimented with social media but failed (remember Orkut, Google+?). The company can use its popular Android smartphone operating system to promote Twitter's mobile app, the report added.

The shares of Twitter, which currently has 313 million monthly active users, jumped more than 20 per cent on Friday on the sales rumours which have been making the rounds for quite some time now.

Twitter, which is struggling to add new users amid stalled growth, now has a market value of nearly $16 billion.

--IANS

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