This is a good time for Twitter to sell itself to somebody. Media hype is pretty high now, with celebrities regularly talking about how they tweet on talk shows instead of promoting their latest film. It is unlikely to get much more intense than it is now.

Last week's rumor that Google was was credible because it made so much sense: Ten years ago -- yes, ten years -- Twitter CEO Evan Williams co-founded a company to create project management software. As a side project, the company created , a Web-based blogging tool. Eventually, Google bought Blogger in 2003. Google still runs Blogger as a free service. Customers can carry Google-powered ads on their blogs, but it's not a requirement, as seen at about computer security.

Mann thinks Williams should do the same with Twitter: Sell the company to a bigger company that sees Twitter as a valuable information resource, not as a business unit that needs to be profitable. Google seems the best fit, Mann concludes, because the companies have similar cultures and change-the-world goals, rather than get-rich-quick ambitions. But there's also Yahoo, the company that has done a good job of running without ruining it -- and probably without making much money from US$24.95 pro accounts.

Hit sites like Blogger, Flickr and now Twitter don't need to be profit centers to be valuable to a bigger firm. In Twitter's case, a search engine and news portal might wring the most value out of Twitter by using it as a massive data feed of what's being linked to and talked about right this second. What's that worth?