Another scoop over the weekend for Kara Swisher at AllThingsDigital, who breaks the news that yes, Facebook and Twitter had been in serious acquisition talks for about a month and no, nothing’s going to come of it (this time around).

Swisher provides detailed background to the talks and an analysis of why the deal broke down, saying: “Well, as is usually the case, over price–was $500 million worth of Facebook stock actually worth $500 million?–and the typical concerns about integration and costs.

“But, more important, it seems, was a feeling among Twitter investors and execs that the start-up should still take a shot at building its revenues–there are none right now–as well as it had done at building its growth.”

Robin Wauters at TechCrunch provides a bit of context:”For comparison: Facebook has raised $516 million in funding to date, while Twitter is backed by $20 million in investment. Twitter boasts 6 million active users, while Facebook reports more than 120 million. Noteworthy caveat: serial entrepreneur and angel investor Marc Andreessen is sitting on both sides of the fence, being both an early investor in Twitter and a member of Facebook’s Board of Directors.”

Magpie has Twitterverse in a flap
Sticking with Twitter, we’ve been seeing some reaction to Be-A-Magpie rippling across the interwebs in the last few days. As we reported in October, the service attempts to monetize users’ Twitter accounts by including intermittent ads.

Jeremiah Owyang tested the service for a few days and found the response from his followers tending very definitely towards the negative. His conclusion: “As you can see, the majority of responses were negative (20), some downright annoyed or angry and ready to leave (7), that means that 56% of respondents had negative reactions. Many were confused (14), or had conditions on why it could be successful, and finally a few were actually ok with it (7) a mere 14%. Given the weight of the majority of negative responses, this system is not ready.”

Michael Arrington weighs in on the discussion saying: “It’s not clear if Twitter will object to this. Their terms and conditions don’t specifically exclude it, but an amendment may be in order. … Users may not be so forgiving though. I imagine anyone who starts to use this will see a sudden decline in followers rather quickly.”

Arrington points to this FriendFeed discussion, started by Robert Scoble, on whether it should be banned. Much of the sentiment expressed suggests that Twitter users wouldn’t mind so much if the ads were a Twitter initiative; that it’s a third party attempt to find a revenue model for Twitter seems to rankle.

In the meantime, the aptly-named Scarecrow script will do away with the magpies for those using Firefox.

Blogging for nothing and the clicks for free
Another story ruffling a few feathers comes from Pete Cashmore at Mashable who sets the scene: “It’s a classic problem: you want to have a popular WordPress blog, but without all the hassles of writing it.”

Cashmore picked up on a press release from WordPressDirect, carefully worded to strike a chord with a certain demographic, but which in effect seems to have backfired – for Mashable readers, at least:

Armed with little more than a desire to publish on a topic, users can create and maintain any number of content-packed, automatically-updated, search engine optimized (SEO) niche websites powered by the WordPress blog engine.

…By clicking a few radio buttons and entering a few search phrases, WordPressDirect will create a blog-driven website, create the blog categories, install the theme, and automatically post content. WordPressDirect contains special software that identifies relevant content and then automatically posts it to the site with proper categorization and tagging to aid visitors and searchers alike.

Cue a slew of comments delivered in three primary flavours – snarky, snide or dismayed – from readers who see it as a spam blogging menace with the potential to wreak havoc on search engine rankings while cluttering up the place for the rest of us.

To his credit, WordPressDirect creator Marty Rozmanith responds with an acknowledgement that the sales pitch was slightly misjudged, adding: “I want to point out that the negative comments I see above are from people who have never tried our service, and are probably largely based on our sales material. It’s true the sales material tries to make everything look ‘effortless.’ We should update it – it is not a true reflection apparently. Hopefully my comments below will provide some more context for this debate … Whether you love us or hate us, I’d rather see commentary on reputable sites like this based on facts, rather than hasty impressions.”

Fair enough, but from a social media point of view, this just serves to illustrate the point that marketing messages need to be meticulously thought through before being released into the world – anything less tempts fate and may require hasty attempts at damage control. Did we learn nothing from the Motrin Moms?