Just because your busy digging a hole doesn't mean you should get a bigger tool to make it deeper. What am I on about? This truly dumb idea:

Let me step back into my M&A shoes for a second, and humbly suggest: the New York Times should acquire Twitter, instead of just professing love for it.

Umm, sure. The NY Times is busy bleeding money. Twitter has no revenue model and is burning through the venture capital they have left. What do you have if you combine the two? A huge rock thrown through the window, with the remaining assets attached.

To be fair, Umair Haque does have a bunch of revenue ideas for Twitter:

Where's the business model? Everywhere. Here's one: charge companies for the right to talk back to people on Twitter enriched by NYT content. Here's another: charge other content providers for the right to distribute via Twitter. Here's yet another: charge advertisers for the right to discuss products and services with people via Twitter. The point is that the NYT could experiment with literally hundreds

Right.... How you're going to charge people for product mentions when they sign up as individuals is an interesting problem all by itself. Take me: A decent proportion of my tweets (which go from my blog to Twitter) are about Cincom Smalltalk. So I should be paying, right? But... I signed up under my name, using a private email address. So have tons of other people. How does Twitter go about pulling that apart and charge? I have no idea, and neither does Haque. Or Twitter.

The Time has enough problems without buying itself a money sink.

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