If the sources at Techcrunch are to be believed then Google is definitely in race to buy out Twitter.
The negotiations are said to be in advanced stage and the price being quoted is in upwards of $250milion.
Even though this price is less than the earlier offer of $500miilion in shares by Facebook the cash component could see google winning the game.

Why this deal looks imminent?
- The founders of Twitter-Van Williams and Biz Stone, earlier sold their blogger platform to google so their past association could come into play.
- Despite rapid growth in its subscribers twitter fails to find perfect monetization strategy for their microblog platform. Google ads could solve that!
- The future might even be bleak with rapid increase in spamming on twitter. One should not forget that rapid increase in spamming could even mar the service and its current features are inadequate to stop it.
- The only asset which twitter has unlike other social networks collection of videos and pics is the status updates by its users which could be valuable to a company like google but not to them.
The acquisition if it succeeds would even provide a boost to the service as it would be coming under Google’s umbrella and could attend mainstream use by integration with other google services.
This could even give a boost to Google’s social networking play and integration of previously discontinued jaiku which it made open source and twitter could help google to revive its fortune in microblog scenario.
Although many players may enter the fray taking it as the next big opportunity to attend the size of facebook google’s part will be important as they already have a plan and resources in place.
Rishabh Kaul Adds – Unlike Facebook or Myspace, twitter is so much more than a social network. It’s a search engine. A medium to track conversations, brand presence what not. And all this in real time. I suppose that’s why it makes great business sense for Google to acquire Twitter considering that Google makes a sizeable portion of money through search. Twitter on the other hand doesn’t have a concrete business model right now and just like youtube it might make sense to bite the acquisition bullet from the Giant google.

Your news is incomplete. The latest is that Twitter declined the offer and it won’t even sell if its offered $1 BN..
This is only rumor.This is true that The founder of Twitter sold out the Blogger to Google but not sure to sale out of Twitter.