Google Gets $1B Chunk of AOL

Caught this CNN/Money article today: Google acquires stake in AOL. Yes, yes — AOL will provide image-based ads to Google’s network, Google’s video search will return results that are part of AOL’s premium services … but here’s the kicker:

The deal will “allow users of Google’s recently introduced instant messaging system Google Talk to communicate with users of AOL’s market-leading AIM instant messaging service.”

What is my IM client of choice? AIM. Which one would I like to be using? Google Talk. Why don’t I? Because all my friends are on AIM. This is huge.

On a related note, I downloaded AIM Triton the other day and it installed so much other crap that I disabled it after one reboot. The straw that broke the camel’s back with it was that all links clicked on from within AIM would open in “AOL Explorer,” which is nothing more than an IE skin. Unacceptable. Traditional AIM still works, I’ve still got an installer for it, and I’ll probably never switch to Triton, especially considering that Google Talk will likely supersede it.

Google Gets $1B Chunk of AOL

5 thoughts on “Google Gets $1B Chunk of AOL

  1. You like firefox so much I’m surprised you’re not using Gaim.

    http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

    They’re about to release 2.0 this month. It has all the features of Trillian, none of the resource hogging and it’s free. I like that Gaim logs everything too. Useful for when I forgot what site someone told me about a week ago that I never looked at.

  2. Oh, sweet relief! Thank the Good Lord, it’s just Smiz! I was sooooo worried that there was really some nasty cyberstalker out on the Intarweb that wanted to harm Dan Premo. If only I could rest easy though – being such a famous “blogger,” there must be thousands of jealousy-crazed fans out there who want to pull a Mark David Chapman and silence you forever. I’ve got a better idea though…why don’t you just stop babbling on about Google and baseball or being blown away when big companies buy small ones, and just bring back Roommate Smack already.

  3. I don’t know … Roommate Smack was good, but was it that good? It might offend some people. Maybe I could implement an age verification system.

    I see that you couldn’t get through the post without a Beatles reference.

Comments are closed.