TechCrunch.com is reporting that according to three anonymous sources Google is ready to acquire the new Web wonder-kid, Twitter.Earlier this year, Twitter received a $35 million infusion from Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) and  Benchmark Capital while previous investors Union Square and Spark also increased their investments, though the amounts were undisclosed.

 

After these investments, Twitter was valuated at $250 million, but is hard to believe that Google will pay this amount of money in order to close the deal, even for a service that saw a 900% traffic increase during the past year.

 

Even TechCrunch.com assumed that the price will be “well, well north of the $250 million valuation.” Twitter, a messaging service launched in 2006 enables users to post and read short messages, limited to 140 characters, in a communications platform that operates across a variety of networks and devices.

 

Twitter’s team currently consists of only 29 employees, and at the end of last year, 11% of online American adults said they used Twitter or a service like it. Twitter and Twitter-like service are used by about one in five adults between the ages of 18 and 34. Ten percent of 35- to 44-year-olds and 5% of 45- to 54-year-olds use Twitter.

 

While is hard to guess why Google intends to buy Twitter, besides blocking Microsoft to snap it first, Twitter has already denied a purchase proposition from Facebook.

 

TechCrunch.com believes that Google’s intention is to create a real-time search engine and to supplement its main search engine by including the results from Twitter.

 

Anyhow, let’s not forget that last year TechCrunch.com has started the rumor about a Google-Digg.com deal, which is the end has proved to be nothing else than…a rumor.