The big twitter news of the moment is that Google has finally fired up it’s twitter account. It went live yesterday with a cryptic comment in binary – “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010″ If you translate that it roughly says "I’m F E E L I N G L U C KY!" While the first official tweet from the Google account could mean nothing at all, it has already been connected to John Battelle’s latest statement of Twitter being the new YouTube.

What’s the most important and quickly growing form of search on the web today? Real time, conversational search. And who’s the YouTube of real time search? Yep. Twitter. It’s an asset Google cannot afford to not own, and also, one they most likely do not have the ability (or brand permission) to build on their own.

Real time search of the conversation of the moment is something that someone should own. Currently it’s owned by twitter and it’s mountain of investors. As everyone has already noted, Facebook was turned away at the door with their $500 million offer. Eventually some company will pony up enough incentive (money!) for twitter to seriously consider selling.

The last statement is always the perfect segue in any conversation about twitter, "How will the company make money?" As everyone knows, twitter currently doesn’t make any money. Zero. There are no ads on twitter. Talk of selling premium business services are tossed around, but how long do you think it will take for premium services to actually pay off the amount of investment that already resides in twitter’s bank accounts? There isn’t enough premium services to even think about that, so moving on, how does twitter make money?

It won’t. At least I only foresee a buy out. When you think really hard about this, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook – which was reportedly the second most visited site on Christmas Day 2008 – as well as the term Web 2.0 didn’t exist 5 years ago! In Facebook’s case of being around, the Facebook that was being created in 2004 in no way resembles what is there today. Unless there happens to be some big changes, as in some sort of secret insider company stuff going on at twitter, it appears that all talk of Google buying out Twitter is probably closer to being on the money than most of us realize.