Microsoft Corp. is said to be in talks to acquire social news reader Prismatic (Woven Inc.) for a figure said to be $30 million.

According to the report, Microsoft may not be alone in taking interest, with Prismatic said to have also spoken to Apple Inc. and Yahoo Inc, with Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. also said to have showed early interest.

Based in San Francisco, Prismatic offers what it describes as a “social recommendation network that helps you keep up with all the things you care about.” In layman’s terms it’s a curated content application offering a service similar to Feedly except instead of subscribing to feeds you subscribe to content areas. Naturally it comes with social sharing options, and users can also upvote or downvote content, kind of like Reddit if it was designed by a 8-year-old.

It’s not an unattractive service, even if it has been done before, but where it seems to lag is user uptake. While users who install Prismatic rate it highly, there doesn’t seem to be an awfully large number of them.

It may be that the company is fairly new to Android, but at the time of writing it has only had 5,000-10,000 installs on Google Play. Figures aren’t available for iOS, but a view of the App Store shows only a few thousand votes; not everyone who uses an app rates it, but say even if it was as low as 1 in 10 users, that would mean only around 23,000 installs. A report on PhoneArena notes that Prismatic only rates at 758 on the app store; for a well funded company that’s not a very high figure.

Microsoft has been on an acquisition spree recently acquiring companies like Sunrise and Acompli, perhaps it sees something in Prismatic that others can’t see.

Founded in around 2011, Prismatic has raised one round (Series A) in December 2012 of $15 million from investors Yuri Milner, Jim Breyer and Accel Partners. While an acquisition at $30 million would be a tidy profit for all three, it’s certainly not an exciting one.