When is an acquisition not an acquisition? When Twitter’s involved, apparently.
The microblogging company
announced today that it had “acquired the team at Fluther, Inc.” Fluther makes a question-and-answer site, a popular category of Web startup as of late. (See Hunch or Quora for examples of better-funded competitors.)
When I asked Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner what kind of deal it had actually struck, she characterized the event as a “talent acquisition.” I pointed out that there’s no such thing, really, as a talent acquisition: Either a company acquires or merges another company and takes on its employment obligations, or it hires employees as individuals. I also pointed out that under the U.S. Constitution, acquiring people was technically illegal.