Aol, Social Networking | featured news

Kevin Systrom's smartest move was to sell Instagram to Facebook early, before having to deliver even an iota of revenue. My prediction is that we’ll look back on Facebook's acquisition of Instagram as a bust—much in the same way we now view News Corp.’s purchase of Myspace, AOL’s purchase of Bebo, and Excite@Home’s purchase of Blue Mountain Arts.

Facebook is paying $550 million to Microsoft for some of the patents the software giant recently bought from AOL, as the social network beefs up its patent defenses ahead of its IPO.

Competition's all relative. Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL all compete for ad dollars, but they all agree that marketers ought to put their budgets into premium content, not search or social.

Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone will become a "social impact" strategic adviser for AOL, as part of its broader integration with online news site the Huffington Post. He will stay at Twitter.

Another 17 of America's richest people, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, junk bond pioneer Michael Milken and AOL co-founder Steve Case, have pledged to give away most of their wealth.

AOL's Propeller Team has announced on their website that Propeller.com will be no longer active from October 1 2010.

AOL is near a deal to sell the Bebo social-networking site to Criterion Capital Partners for a fraction of the price it paid two years ago to buy it.

Aol launched Lifestream, a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say Aol. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone product at lifestream.aol.com.

AOL is currently in talks to acquire Mashable, the world's largest technology blog. A sale to the content-obsessed internet company would mean Mashable's 24-year-old founder Pete Cashmore really would have everything.

Just last week, Aol celebrated its re-emergence as an independently-traded company. But it's one main advantage is that it still commands a large audience, and in fact was the fourth largest Website in the U.S.—until last month. ComScore data for November, 2009 shows that Facebook surpassed Aol with 102.9 million unique visitors in the U.S., versus 99.7 million for Aol.