Rumours are flying about the possible acquisition of Twitter by Apple.

Apple's got a huge war chest (hope chest?) of some $US29 billion, and there have been recent calls for the company to do something with it - either put it to use, pay a dividend, or repurchase some shares.

After all, the reserves are roughly $31 per share. (As of this writing, Apple shares stood at $US132.85 in after-hours trading.)

But why would Apple buy Twitter? More to the point, why would anyone buy Twitter?

If Twitter closed down tomorrow, nobody would really miss it. Well, that's an exaggeration, but they'd only miss it until a Twitter clone appeared.

There's no real investment on the part of Twitter users. Sure, it might take a while to recreate your current pattern of followers and following, but it's not like YouTube or Facebook where there's an investment of content.

So a potential purchaser would want to be darn sure that you could get a return on the supposed $US700 million investment before the fad blows over. And Twitter's revenue, as far as I'm aware, is zero.

What could Apple do? Insert an ad in every tweet? That'll go down well with the SMS users.

Or give every iPhone buyer free access to Twitter? Oh, wait...

Remember, Apple loves profit. That's not a bad thing - companies are supposed to make. But Apple seems reluctant to sacrifice margin for volume, and that seems to be serving shareholders well.

For all I know, Apple will have announced the acquisition by the time you read this and I'll be proved wrong. But it just doesn't make sense to me.

The idea that Apple might buy Electronic Arts is a little more appealing.

EA does actually have a business (games, in case that's an area you have absolutely no interest in), it does produce some Mac titles, and Apple has been pushing the iPhone/iPod touch as a game platform.

After all, one of the perennial jibes at the Mac platform is a lack of big-name games.

But I'm not convinced.

Apart from anything else, I've heard reports that the downturn in consumer spending is hurting the games industry (sales of used games are booming).

And there's also the idea that the industry wants to keep moving away from selling physical media to an Internet-delivered 'virtual console' as a means of avoiding unauthorised copying and preventing resale. That would also reduce the reliance on specific hardware.

So I'm not saying it's going to happen, just that an Apple-EA union makes more sense to me than Apple hooking up with Twitter.