"The Short History of the Internet is Littered with Value Destruction of Spectacular Proportions."  Well, I can't disagree with that, and Bernstein analyst Jeff Lindsey offers up a number of examples in his recent report The Ruinous History of "Pre-Business" Internet Deals, which I wish I could link to.  But his view that:

"Whoever buys [Twitter] will likely have to operate it at a loss in perpetuity, or until the next cool Web 2.0 social networking concept comes along and Twitter tweets no more," the analyst writes in his report entitled "The Ruinous History of 'Pre Business' Internet Deals." "Sadly, this would not be the first time that a major Internet company had made a bad deal."

Failwhale

This point-of-view illustrates a lack of imagination, in that it's way too early to tell how many ways Twitter will be able to become a profitable business.  But I believe they will figure it out.  Might an acquirer run it into the ground?  Sure, but M&A related value destruction is not limited to the internet space.  It happens in every industry, all the time.

A contrasting perspective is offered up by Jon Fine at Business Week in his column titled Twitter and (Not) Monetizing the Attention Economy:

"But I actually believe Twitter will find a way to make some coin off its service—in the barest, basest and crudest form, all they gotta do is slap a text ad or two on its pages. The thing is, though, that there’s no reason to share any of that with the users who are generating Twitter’s content. It is a MySpace/Facebook model of generating content—that is, something people will do for free.

Twitter isn't going away anytime soon.