Skip Google & Microsoft, Will eBay Buy Twitter?

After reading an interesting article titled ‘Why Google Will Buy Twitter‘ where Douglas points out that it could be prime buying material for not only Google, but Microsoft too. But I’m wondering, what benefit could there be if eBay were to pick this up?

Google & Microsoft

Douglas rightly points out that Google Wave and Buzz are complete flops. Wave had its strategy wrong and Buzz was hammered due to privacy issues in the beginning. Where-as Balmer at Microsoft is really going for it with Bing and has pockets deep enough to pick up a few high profile businesses.

Capacity Issues

While Microsoft & Google might appear to be prime technology based companies to solve the whale issue (a big whale appears when its over capacity, annoyingly quite often too), eBay has immense practical knowledge itself with deploying its platform over some +35 countries, +80 million users and dealing with some insane amount of new listings each day.

There was a time when eBay was quite flaky, we used to dread Friday mornings and that was nearly always our morning off. Something was always being updated and something nearly always didn’t work that morning before 12. But thats long gone now.

So what could they do with Twitter?

Assuming that eBay can leverage their knowledge to solve the the whale issue, this does give them a standpoint that they’ve not had before. They have access to an huge audience of users that work on real-time data.

Maybe its a side entrance to Facebook, B2B users, a different way of communicating directly with buyers. I’m not sure why it feels right, but it does.

If…

If you were eBay, Google, Microsoft or someone else for that matter and knew that Twitter was up for grabs, what would you do with it?