On May 5th Owen Thomas at Gawker.com made some statements hinting toward a possible sale of Twitter to a very heavy-hitter in the tech world, Apple. However, on May 7, 2009 Ian Paul confirmed PC World Twitter’s statement that they are in-fact not for sale.

“President of Operations Santosh Jayaram was talking about the future of Twitter’s search engine. Speaking on a discussion panel with representatives from Twitter and LinkedIn, Jayaram said Twitter was going to start indexing Web pages linked to in Twitter posts, according to CNET. The basic idea behind indexing Web pages is not to compete against larger search engines like Google, but to supply a faster alternative for real-time information.

Jayaram also said that Twitter would institute a reputation ranking system for its users, in order to help Twitter’s search engine rank search results. When you search a “trending topic” on Twitter — the list of Twitter’s 10 most popular topics that appears in a Twitter user’s sidebar — the reputations of people posting messages about your particular topic would be taken into account when ranking search results. Twitter’s engineers are still trying to figure out how to determine a Twitter user’s reputation, but hopefully they will not create some sort of Twitterocracy like Loic Lemeur has suggested.”

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/164493/twitter_were_not_for_sale.html