Specious Prediction: eBay buys Twitter & challenges Google News

Kudos to David Berlind for predicting seven years ago that IBM would buy Sun (His headline was When Will IBM Buy Sun? Essentially: "As a tool for marginalizing Microsoft, Java is everything OS/2 was not.")

In that spirit, here's my wild M&A prediction to happen in the next 12 months: eBay buys Twitter. (Why bother with TwitPay, when you can the cow...) It makes no less sense than eBay buying Skype. And they do this to go after the 900 pound gorilla, el Goog.

Disclaimer: I'm making this up as I go along, based on my own observations, superstitions, hypotheses. I don't claim to the ... but anybody who does, should offer a clearer scenario.

First, if Twitter scoops up one or two URL shorteners, they can potentially intercept every link out to a popular news source. No, you wouldn't intercept links to obscure blogs, but they would do it to with anyone large enough to cut a deal with. Or maybe the newspaper does it on their own (as WashPost, Salon, Forbes do). Twitter just gets around to streamlining this messy process.

There was a lot of irrationality about the paywalls that the NYT had thrown up. Well, people are going to hate adwalls even more when they become common as print revenues start to recede. News sites like any retail outfit, would like its visitors to get in the habit of staying around, and becoming regulars. Those one-hit readers are going to have to pay, with their time.

And here's where PayPal comes into play -- combined Twitter account, you make it very easy for a user to pay to get through that adwall. As I illustrated it 18 months ago in PaperTrust: make newspaper subscriptions count for something. If you're a paying subscriber, you'll be able to bypass intrusive ads. You'll be able to get stories in single-page format by default. And what else is in for the newspaper.com?  Oh, the social demographic data that users haven't been sharing with it.

All of a sudden, Google News as the prime mediator is threatened! Yes, indeed, people will go to Twitter or Facebook to get their news links from their friends.

Sure, the usual suspects will cry about the paywalls again. So we'll throw them a bone too The tip jar will be vastly simplified when it all goes through a single funnel. The reader tips the source a few cents, and eTwitBayPal gets a cut. New media mavens like Clay Shirky will have to stop writing dreck like Why Small Payments Won't Save Publishers, but they will write stuff like Why Small Payments Will Help Authors, and if it's really any good, readers will pay them. Links & retweets will be no longer be the currency of authority; the currency of authority will be, well, currency.

I have no clue whatsoever if this will happen; particularly as I have zero insight into the VC world. I am just rather tired of the new media gurus writing off the reading public as a bunch of cheap bastards who would never pay a dime for online news. I don't know if anyone had foreseen the market for secondhand junk and virtual storefronts. eBay became the clearinghouse for that. It could happen to news as well.