being able to take the mick out of so called "experts" in my office who use AOL.... shame

that blows nobody any good.

Not sure what is meant here by "Splitting up"

This mean all of AOL will be gone for good?

It means the ISP portion of AOL will be split from the Advertising portion of the same.

What I want to know is why? Something to do with taxes? Or maybe reported revenue?

Maybe so they can keep part of it and chop the other if it comes down to it?

if they split AOhell will ISP side provide the data on its users to the advertising section?

Where I am, we are completely serviced by Time Warner Cable, broadband and telephony services... It was quite funny when a lot of the AOL "High Speed" users found out that they could ditch aol entirely and use Road Runner, at a reduced price and wouldn't need the viral infection that was the AOL "Client".

While I will certainly miss the pocket money I got from fixing AOL configured computers, I am looking forward to the death nail of that bastard "You've got mail..." voice over that always seemed to be the precursor to problems.

IF TW is actually pruning AOL, I say good riddance!

"During the last three months of 2007 the company had 109m average monthly domestic unique visitors and 49bn domestic page views, according to comScore Media Metrix."

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say those figures are grossly overstated. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. population estimate for July 2007 was 301,621,157. In other words, comScore Media Metrix is claiming that during the last three months of 2007, 36.138 percent of the U.S. populace visited AOL each month, with each of those people viewing 426 pages each month.

BECAUSE WHEN YOU OPEN IT YOU KNOW THAT THE WHOLE THING WILL BE WRITTEN LIKE THIS AND THERE WILL BE NO PUNCTUATION SO ITS VERY DIFFICULT TO MAKE SENSE OF WHAT IS BEING ASKED AND THEY WILL WRITE A HUGE PARAGRAPH WHICH TAKES 5 MINUTES TO DECIPHER BEFORE YOU CAN EVEN THINK ABOUT HOW TO REPLY AND SO ON AND SO FORTH

Pisses me off!

please separate winamp from AOL! it used to be nice, now its a bloated piece of realware.

As for the rest of it, remember old yeller?

Anyone know how this might effect the AOL Instant Messaging protocol? I've the least amount of trouble with it compared to the others i've used over the years. Would hate to see it go.

Who's going to provide the raw materials for crap mobiles, lightning-storm-in-a-microwave experiments and "isn't this automatically generated password combo funny/obscene/surreal" gags now? An era has passed.

Still, on the bright side, it should be simpler to meet those landfill waste targets.

AOL was split on the access side of things several months ago; the UK and France are basically independent ISP's who have a revenue sharing agreement with the states AOL. 109m users is quite possible because the report didnt mention what countries they are from (the UK AOL has 2million+ users) and the portal is open to everyone, even non-AOL customers. So 109m is possible....

Where did it mention just the US page views?

lol very True Jason!

You are also likely to receive emails from AOL users with varying degrees of colours and font sizes. Thankfully i throw everything away from anything@AOL.com/uk addresses.

Considering this is about AOL.com do we brits really need to care what they are doing when it wont affect AOL.co.uk.

i see this as the first step before a sale of the remaining networking activities.

Especially, AOL owns one of the biggest worldwide backbones (ATDN). And it's a Tier-One backbone, very classy... This probably has some value.

AFAIK the AIM _protocol_ is not going to be impacted at all; it is used by a large group of messenger clients both commercially developed and OSS who have precious little to do with AOL itself.

Worry about the AIM servers instead. I don't know whether any are run independently from AOL.

Hi, yes AOL still collected the fee every month and the customers were not informed of the changes. So if you have broadband its free on the internet, uninstall the memory hog AOL software and go to www.aol.com...

"Where did it mention just the US page views?"

err, twice: "During the last three months of 2007 the company had 109m average monthly domestic unique visitors and 49bn domestic page views, according to comScore Media Metrix."

To a US-based organisation, "Domestic" = US

...not to mention that if an email comes through a line of AOL users, you can have 10 - 15 bloody attachments to open before you get to the original message.

I've finally weaned my mum off of AOL, so that will be nearly the end of that crap for me, anyway...

Fair enough, I guess.

I was just thinking along the lines that AOL is a fairly big organisation in the UK, too. Or did they sell-out to Carphone Warehouse? Can't quite remember what happened there.