Facebook & Twitter: marriage or make-overs?

This is from Sarah Lacey in Business Week.

Sure, Facebook investor and board member Peter Thiel can try to damp enthusiasm for Twitter by saying Facebook is eyeing lots of acquisitions. But there's a reason Facebook was hungry enough for Twitter that it offered $500 million in stock and cash to a company with a small staff and no revenue—in the middle of a recession.

And there's a reason Twitter didn't take it. Twitter knows it's just getting started, and it is the closest thing to an eventual threat. It would have been like Facebook taking Viacom up on its $750 million offer or accepting $1 billion from Yahoo! back in 2006.

When I last spoke to Twitter founder and CEO Evan Williams, he coyly told me he was nowhere near done building out Twitter as a service or a business and that he has a clear vision for both. He's not going into a lot of detail, but I can tell you it has a lot to do with the real-time news feed that Twitter has become; there's also a lot of potential in the way Twitter lets you search for information on the Web in real time—not at some fixed point in the Web's recent past.