These days, a lot of people are raving (and sometimes even ranting) about Twitter. But several years ago, after E-mail was “acknowledged” as the Web’s super-app, AOL’s [TWX] instant messenger service was the new front-runner for super-app status. Sure, there was that massive dilution/fragmentation of IM users between AIM and all of the the rest. But many news outlets kept saying that AIM was still the biggest IM service, based upon the total number of active subscribers and daily traffic.

So it was quite a shock this morning (around 8:15 AM, to be a bit more precise) to be passing by the Mac Pro and seeing the familiar buddy list replaced by the AIM login panel, requesting that I enter my password. That only happens in Adium when it loses the IM connection to the service and wants me to re-establish my credentials. After several attempts at trying to re-login via Adium, I fired up a Web browser and hit aol.com to see if I could reset any hijinks with any flaky SNS tokens and thereby get back into AIM. Unfortunately, while I did get into aol.com and was able to verify that at least the E-mail service was operational, I was still unable to log into AIM from the common panel.

So I was left with just waiting it out…

And AIM eventually came back several minutes later (around 8:30-ish)… But, that was a frantic several minutes!

N.B.

In case you’re wondering: yes, those are actual AOL-AIM T-shirts that are hanging in one of my closets. I never realized that the logo on the back of one of them (the left one) matches the front of another (the right one). It was just fortuitous that the two happened to be hanging adjacent to each other today.

I was actually looking for a fresh T-shirt this morning during the AIM outage… curious that I noticed this, right?

Other title candidates were:

• AIM Outage
• Outrageous AIM Outage
• AIM Outage (for Me)
• AIM Outage? Boo!

A Little Bit: 

A few hours ago, Time Warner [TWX] announced the ousting of CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant from the helm of AOL, LLC, replacing them with Tim Armstrong, lately of Google [GOOG] as one of its SVP’s. The tenure of Falco and Grant has been marred with a tremendous amount of turbulence and controversy during a time when AOL could ill afford such occurrences; it is expected that Armstrong will bring some calm and direction to the beleaguered online advertising/properties firm. There is even speculation that AOL will finally be spun off from Time Warner.

Earlier today, AOL [TWX] has announced laying off another 700 employees from its workforce. In this era of massive job losses, it does not seem as massive as in years past, but nevertheless, with only about 7,000 workers remaining since the last wave of AOL layoffs, the number is still a very large one.

In the past, I’ve mentioned that online advertising is a tricky business, where it is easy for one company (like Google [GOOG]) to completely and utterly dominate the market to the point of a monopoly because of its access to consumers via search. It’s one of those drug dealer mentalities that works so well in various media (from actually selling illicit drugs, to viral marketing, to search…), that anybody who wants to play in the advertising game has to pay the leader in many different ways. It is unfortunate that AOL has gotten caught in the advertising hype and now has to struggle harder with its remaining properties and resources to eke out some form of survival.

Obviously, this hurts the employees as well. I still get E-mails and IM’s from people who are unaware that I had retired from AOL more than a year ago, asking for architectural and technical assistance on the various systems and business programs I’d created/launched/developed or participated in. With the ever-dwindling pool of knowledge, it will become even  more difficult for the surviving employees to conduct their daily business without spending more time researching issues and technology on their own instead of simply contacting the authority; and since a lot of the technology at AOL has actually been cutting edge and developed in-house, and in some cases actually leading in the open source movements, that information access was rarified and exclusive to begin with. Now it may just be absent…

Good luck, AOL’ers.

More Reading

• Exclusive: AOL to Lay Off 10 Percent of Staff, Cutting 700, Due to Ad Meltdown and a Refocusing on New Structure (All Things Digital, Kara Swisher)
• AOL CEO Randy Falco’s Entire Memo to the Troops on Layoffs (All Things Digital, Kara Swisher)

Given all of the speculation surrounding whether AOL [TWX] and Yahoo [YHOO] are being sincere in their talks, and the current mega-swirl in CBS’ [CBS] declining value, here’s an interesting notion:

Hey, Jeff Bewkes, why not sell AOL to Yahoo, and then buy up CBS?

This would give Time Warner that pure broadcast play that it’s been itching for, and given their tumultuous partnerships with other broadcast entities, perhaps it is best for Time Warner to own it all. Of course, given the tough lesson that both CBS and Time Warner have learned about the volatility and excessive risk on depending on advertising, it would be prudent to act on other revenue streams, like commerce.

On the flip-side, all of the AOL-Yahoo noise is either drippy-drabby or just confusing. Why waste time on all of this and just let ‘em get it on? Yes, there is a lot of duplication/redundancy between the two companies, and certainly there is a strong sentiment against Yahoo’s board, given a lot of the less-than-good decisions made over the past few years. But perhaps the best course of action for everybody (and this includes shareholders, employees, and even the board) would be combine the two companies, cut out all of the redundancies, and then lay off 60-80% of the work force. At that point, you should have a fairly lean-mean-ready-to-go kind of company that can focus only on its remaining properties. The future for the combined company may very well be to remain a niche player in the online advertising space until purchased by another entity.

In fact, if either Microsoft [MSFT] or General Electric [GE] or even Time Warner comes back after the consolidation, it may be an excellent time to pick up the new AOL-Yahoo-wuzziz.

This is one of those perennial murmurs through the IT community, it seems: who/what is going to buy AOL, and what is the damage going to be?

As an ex-AOL’er, this is always a fun thread to follow, across the blogosphere and even as bleed-through to traditional media.

Today, CNBC is repeating a Reuters article that mentions that, yes, AOL and Yahoo are still talking about a possible merger (or buyout), but nothing is definite.

And, for a bit of a contrasting commentary: just yesterday, the guys at SAI had a quickie post about why it seems that nothing will come of the negotiations.

N.B.

Other proposed titles for this post:

• AOL-Yahoo Merger Talks Sub Rosa?
• AOL-Yahoo Merger: What Flavor Coating Do You Like?

Ah, finally! A recent post from somebody outside of the OpenID devsphere about OpenID.

During my tenure at AOL, one of things I always wondered about was: How do external consumers and outside developers look at our OpenID? When creating the enterprise transactions systems, I had the luxury of using AOL internal IDs and OpenIDs, but when a user accessed our systems from the Great Beyond, the OpenID was frequently the only available ID source for the person/entity. There were even a few public blogs from corporate OpenID developers about how great OpenID was, and how it was overwhelmingly popular with folks outside of AOL. So, whenever the requirements architects came over and handed me their requests, during my architecture sessions it’d be brought up whether OpenID would be the sole identity mechanism to deploy, or whether for robustness, we should provide it as merely an available option. I’d opt to provide it as an option, with extensive identity checking and correlation– under many circumstances, my systems would be looking for one and only one valid user identity.

So to see dissension among potential consumers is always fascinating and an excellent learning opportunity. When creating APIs and frameworks, particularly things that integrate diverse systems with varying scaling capabilities, learning about how my customer base wants to use my stuff and how they actually do use my stuff definitely contributes to the continuous improvement of my deliverables, whether they’re low-level APIs, app-level components, frameworks, finished applications, and/or app suites.

N.B.

None of the info divulged above is a company secret.

The “somebody” I mentioned above is a fella named Kyle. Phun stuff.