Race to buy Twitter intensifies; may receive bids this week

New York: As Google, Salesforce and even Walt Disney join the race to buy Twitter, the micro-blogging website is expected to receive bids this week, media reported on Wednesday.

According to Wall Street Journal, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is "building a case to Salesforce.com Inc. investors and others that his company should be the buyer."

Like LinkedIn which the Cloud computing company Salesforce wanted to buy but lost to Microsoft, Twitter can bring Salesforce key data to create insights for its corporate clients, the WSJ report added.

The acquisition of Twitter - struggling to add new users amid stalled growth - may cost over $20 billion. It currently has 313 million monthly active users.

Salesforce is also reportedly trying to block the $26.2 billion Microsoft-LinkedIn deal, arguing that Microsoft`s acquisition of the enterprise social network LinkedIn will be anti-competitive.

According to a recent report in pcworld.com, Salesforce Chief Legal Officer Burke Norton will take the company`s argument to the European Union`s anti-trust authorities.

"Microsoft`s proposed acquisition of LinkedIn threatens the future of innovation and competition," Norton said in a statement.

Salesforce is vying for a social networking platform in its kitty for long.

The company, "which reached $6 billion in annual revenue faster than any other enterprise software company", offers customer service software, market research tools, email marketing systems and other products and several of them already use social media.

Google, on the other hand, has experimented with social media but failed (remember Orkut, Google+?).

The company can use its popular Android smartphone operating system to promote Twitter`s mobile app, earlier media reports added.