The end of Digg independence?

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According to Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, it seems that Google and Microsoft are preparing to make an offer on Digg. The question is : how much does it worth right now? Arrington reports that the offer will be in the range of $200 million to $225 million. If this are the correct informations, that’s well below the $300 million price a bank working for Digg was floating a year ago.

But here’s another problem in here, they buyers must be asking themselves: if they buy Digg, will users rebel? Just last week, Kevin Rose (Digg’s founder) declared at a conference in Miami how the Digg community would react if his company got acquired:

For us, we have a fully funded business model, and we have a great ad relationship with Microsoft, and it feels really good to be able to react quickly and not have to worry about some of the problems that come with working with a larger company.

I’ve had several friends that have been acquired by the Yahoos and Googles of the world, and while there is some upside in certain things, for the most part, it slows things down. You can’t get a product out the door fast enough.

Here are some interesting opinions regarding the sale of Digg from some Digg users :

“…i’ve got a bad feeling about this…” (Hobbes24)
“Stay above corporate influence …Well as much as you can…. If you got to sell go with google” (macwisdom )
“Somehow i think if Microsoft manages to buy digg a larger revolt than 09 F9 11… will happen, at least i know what i will do” (t2t2)

“1. msft has spent enough time on this site to realize they are hated, why would they buy a community that hates them?
2. google has lost a few billion the last few months. while a digg purchase is still a drop in the bucket for them, i assume social website acquisitions can’t be a high priority for them and will be frowned upon by the market
3. after hd-dvd, i wouldn’t want digg if i had to buy it. why drop a couple hundred mil for a group that will turn on and shut the site down you in a second?” (canewediggit)

As you can see, Digg users hate Microsoft, but they won’t be too mad if Google aquires Digg. Well, we never know what the future has in stores but we will defenetly find out when the time comes.