The rumor mill has been working overtime on Friday over reports that major search engine; Google is in late stages to buyout micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter.

TechCrunch reports two separate sources claiming that Google is in the late stages of a deal to buy Twitter, while another says that the buy out is at a much earlier stage.

Twitter's price tag is not yet clear but it could be above $250.0 million.

A deal for Twitter has long been rumored. Potential suitors have included the social networking site Facebook, which reportedly made a large offer in late 2008. Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has also been rumored to be a possible suitor of the California-based company.

Twitter's value is in its content, growing by 6.0 million tweets per day. Twitter is attractive because it has built a service that attracts this much volume, creating a constantly growing, twitching, seething real-time source of comments, news and opinions, said Jeff Mann of Gartner research.

This is not the first time that rumors of Google buying Twitter arises. A few weeks ago, Google CEO Erich Schmidt called Twitter a poor man's e-mail system at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Schmidt said Google would wait for prices to get better

before attempting any acquisitions. Schmidt did not specify at that time if talks had even commenced between the two companies.

Google will benefit from owning Twitter as it delivers real-time search, something that Google does not offer and will allow them to monetize the traffic to the social-networking site which is something Twitter has not been able to do up to this date.

If the deal does go through, it will not be the first time that the two companies do business together. Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone already sold Blogger to Google five years ago.

Google shares were down $2.17 or 0.60 percent to $360.33 in morning trade on the Nasdaq.

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