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Google To Purchase Stake In AOL For $1 Billion

Posted by Zonk on from the that-is-a-lot-of-free-cds dept.

Lord Haha writes "It appears that Google may be on the verge of purchasing a 5% stake in AOL." From the article: "A tie-up with Google would make sense. Time Warner has been losing out online to rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo. For its part, Google may be interested in getting access to AOL's e-mail and instant messaging service. It would strengthen Google's hand against rivals Yahoo and Microsoft, who have well-established webmail and instant messaging services. Google is a relative newcomer to this area with Gmail and Googletalk." More commentary on News.com. Big change from just a few days ago.

2 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Re:New instant messenger? by mccalli · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I like the pun, but I'm going to take the idea seriously for a moment.

    Google do a Jabber-based service. AOL of course do AIM. Do you think they'd consider merging the two networks? Because a Jabber-based AIM would be a major boost for the protocol. They're adding voice to it, perhaps video next?

    Of course I'm getting ahead of myself, 5% is just that - 5%. But still, it's worth a thought. And yes, I'm biased. I'm an iChat user which supports Jabber, and it would be useful to have the Jabber protocol grow in functionality and see the Jabber gateways to other networks start acting as a universal switching point.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  2. favored placement for aol? by slizz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    from a nytimes article on the subject: "Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before."

    i dont know if this means that google will be changing search results, but if it does, this is a pretty drastic philosophy change, and something that seems to bode extremely negatively for googles future