Sceptics Spike £460 Million Apple-Twitter Rumours

Skeptical commentators have poured cold water on the rumours floating today that Apple is in “late stage” talks to buy Twitter for £460 million ($700 million).

The rumours appear to have emerged from one source only and make no sense at all, according to bloggers such as Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal’s BoomTown blog, and Charles Arthur of The Guardian.

Apple is supposed to have offered $700 million for the Twitter micro-blogging service, according to a rumour floated at TechCrunch and ValleyWag. However, both Arthur and Swisher point out that the purchase would make little sense, as Twitter is a cross-platform blogging service already well-used on iPhones , and Apple is a hardware company, with little interest in software besides that which sells its own services such as iTunes.

Also Twitter’s founders are in New York at an awards event, and don’t appear to be pre-occupied with the last details of a merger deal.

Rumours earlier this year, that Google was buying Twitter came to nothing, and the only credible negotiations we know of were with Facebook last year, when Twitter rejected $500 million.

Since then, Twitter has grown explosively, reportedly at 40 percent per week since an appearance on the Oprah show, and has been implicated in spreading the swine flu panic.

The company’s business model still has not evolved to anything generating revenue, although it is apparently considering paid account, and Microsoft has sponsored a site for tweeting chief executives.