AOL founder Steve Case may have left Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) and AOL, but he isn't out of the web space entirely. His latest venture, Revolution Money, promises to lower transaction fees on the Web. And he has an interesting new partner in the venture: his old friend, AOL.

Revolution Money, still in its pilot stage, will let users transfer money to individuals and merchants for free through its Revolution MoneyExchange service. AOL will be a launch partner, and will allow users and customers to make payments and fund transfers through its AOL instant messaging service, AIM, for free. It will also offer RevolutionCard, a credit card with an interchange fee of 0.5%, which is below the average of 1.9% for other cards.

The truth is that you and I will win from this venture because this will help drive fees down. The bad news is that as transaction fees move closer and closer to zero, so do the profit margins. Whether the margins are enough to keep these operations viable is an open question.

Given my position as a long-time denizen of the dot-com world, with dozens of contacts in new media and venture capital and all of the numbered Webs (1.0, 2.0 and maybe even 3.0), I'm quite frequently invited to things. Some are valuable networking tools, like LinkedIn; others are fun and a bit useful for keeping track of my virtual colleagues, like Twitter. Still others, like AIM, are vital for day-to-day working life.

And then there are the sites where my so-called "friends" hang out. It seems quite ironic that many of the former colleagues and distant contacts who invite me to "keep up with what he and your other friends are doing" were never what I would categorize as "friends." Vexing rivals? Quixotic bosses? Difficult customers? Unhappy underlings? Probably more like it. While I understand that social networking sites like Facebook.com and StumbleUpon and, to a lesser extent, MySpace and del.icio.us and the rest of them, are the rage right now -- and are used by many legitimate corporate types for actual work purposes -- well, I'm highly uncomfortable with the rampant use of the word "friend."

Let's face it: even if I'm pleased because Brian in Legal delivered that contract to me quickly, he's not actually my "buddy"; nor is the receptionist you just hired ready to be asked to join your "circle of friends." Plenty of people with whom I could happily carry on pre-conference-call banter, while I'm sure they're quite lovely, just aren't friends. Flickr gives us a break and lets us designate lots of "contacts," while Twitter has recently changed its nomenclature to count those you are following, and those that follow you. This makes sense to me! This is not presumptuous or uncomfortable.

Just because my name is in your contact list, Mr. and Ms. New Media Executive, it does not mean that you are my friend.

A piece in today's Wall Street Journal takes a look at the growing popularity of instant messaging as a means of communication at work. As the Journal puts it, "Instant messaging is invading and changing the workplace. Employees started to sneak instant messaging into the office in the late 1990s, but now more companies are endorsing it. Faster and more casual than email, instant messaging can foster broader collaboration among employees even as it further blurs the boundaries between work and life."

Those of us who work for BloggingStocks are in constant communication via AOL Instant Messenger (Full Disclosure: BloggingStocks is owned by AOL): We discuss story ideas, the markets, and chat. Instant messaging has built a sense of camaraderie and closeness among people working thousands of miles apart that frankly never would have developed through more traditional lines of communication.

Several experts quoted in the piece predict that instant messaging at work will grow rapidly in popularity: Currently about 1/3 of workers IM at work, often without the knowledge of their bosses, but one expert believes that it will become the dominant method of communication in the workplace.

As well it should.

We've all been in this situation: We answer a call on our cell and the first thing we hear is, "Hi, where are you?"
And indeed, cellular phone companies do offer today an array of location-based services to help parents keep tab on their kids, get directions and more.

What about when we are online then? Would a similar service be helpful? Well, Time Warner Inc.'s (NYSE:TWX) AOL Skyhook application, the new free location plug-in for its AIM instant messaging will do just that -- it will show users where their buddies are located. It is the first of several new location-aware capabilities AOL plans to add to AIM in the next couple of months.

How is that possible? I mean, GPS I can understand -- a chip inside the handset -- but how can Skyhook tell my online location? Well, apparently, Skyhook used a fleet of trucks to scan hotspots and our home wireless routers as they drove around Canadian and U.S. cities and got the routers' unique code. With that, Skyhook built a 16 million Wi-Fi access points database that covers 70% of the population.

AOL might run into a problem with wireless companies already offering a similar services -- why should it facilitate AIM's Skyhook service for AIM mobile clients? However, some have pointed out that GPS location in downtown areas isn't so accurate. Skyhook could be a cheap solution.

Finally, for all those concerned about privacy, no worries. Users can opt out and choose not to share their location and AOL doesn't store any customer-specific data so it can't track movements. AIM just continues to be on the forefront of instant messaging innovation.

The gamble that Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) made with AOL was fairly simple, but risky. Exit the internet service provider business and give up most of that revenue. Offer services like e-mail and access to AOL content for free. Hope that the number of visitors and pageviews grows and that the advertising from these will grow beyond the subscription revenue.

Early numbers from comScore are promising. AOL's unique visitors grew 9% in February to 88.9 million. Visitors to MapQuest grew 12% to 45.1 million. AIM.com visitors were up 7%. Of the major AOL properties, only Netscape was down, by 14%. Netscape moved from being a portal to a user-created content site late last year.

Management at Time Warner has to breathe a sigh of relief. Without a growing audience base, moving advertising revenue up would be nearly impossible. If the future months keep up the trend, the change in model may well pay off.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

AOL's instant messenging program "AIM" is clearly growing up. This morning a press release announced that its customized AIM Pro service will be added to Merrill Lynch's Institutional Electronic trading suite tied in with Wall Street Source, a financial news and data provider in which Merrill Lynch owns an equity interest.

This is further evidence that instant messenging programs, particularly AIM, are becoming more and more mainstream. AIM Pro is the premium version of AIM that provides at-work users with a streamlined AIM Buddy List feature, integration with Microsoft Outlook, Web collaboration services, video conferencing, SSL encryption, and automatic anti-virus file scanning for confidential business communications.

AIM is the defacto communication tool used by almost everyone tied to Wall Street. More than half the time a brokerage firm strategist or analyst is interviewed on CNBC or Bloomberg TV on their own brokerage and trading floor you can hear the AIM sound effects in the background.

ComScore is out with its September numbers for Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) and AOL's largest sites. These numbers, along with data from Nielsen/NetRatings and Alexa are used to follow the audience activity at major web properties.

September was not a particularly good month for Time Warner's web properties. The total US audience of unique web users rose 2% from the same month a year ago to 173.4 million. Only one major Time Warner site grew faster than that. Unique visitors to MapQuest were up 10% to 48.6 million.

Unique visitors to the Time Warner network of sites rose 1% to 120.3 million. AOL was down 1% to 88 million. Visitors to the AIM.com and AIM Application site fell 1% to 29.6 million unique visitors.

CNN.com's unique visitors fell 7% to 24.4 million compared to September 2005.

Netscape, in the midst of its transition to a blog site, fell 23% to 9.9 million. Unique visits to the ICQ community site fell 48% to 911,000.

The ComScore data supports the figures from the other two measurement services. If AOL is planning to replace subscription revenue with online advertising dollars, the audience of its web properties is going to have to start growing.

Douglas McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Nielsen/NetRatings has come out with its September figures for unique visitors to major websites.

The audience for Time Warner Inc's (NYSE: TWX) AOL has not started to show any significant increase since the company began migrating the big web operation from being subscription-based to being advertising supported.

For September, AOL's unique visitors numbered 74.8 million up 3.1% from September 2005. Two properties that help make up the AOL count are AOL Instant Messenger and Moviefone. Traffic to the AIM site dropped 10.3% to 46.2 million unique visitors. Moviefone rose .4% to 8.8 million. In August, Moviefone unique visitors numbered 10.1 million.

Netscape traffic took a large tumble year-over-year as AOL navigates the change of its content from standard web portal fare to "social news" where users vote on stories. Unique visitors to Netscape fell 31.9% to 9.1 million. This figure was up from 8.2 million in August.

CNN unique visitors were down 5.1% to 24.7 million. Visitors to community site ICQ dropped 26.1% to 1.3 million.

If AOL is going to turn a corner, the numbers are going to have to improve a great deal over the balance of the year. But that is not news.

Douglas McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Several companies evaluate traffic to websites. Alexa, a unit of Amazon.com, has daily updates. Two large audience measurement firms, comScore and NielsenNetratings, produce monthly reports. As would be expected, since the figures from all three are based on samples, the numbers often differ from one another.

ComScore's August report on Time Warner sites breaks traffic down for both the family of sites in total, but also reports traffic at individual sites.

During August, the Time Warner Network, as it is called by comScore, has total unique visitors of 121.6 million. That was up 2% from the previous year. The total Internet audience for the US rose 3% to 173.4 million.

Traffic to AOL rose 1% to 88.9 million. Mapquest traffic rose 12% to 53.2 million, which would appear to make it an unusually successful property for AOL. Traffic to AIM.com, the instant messaging home site fell 2% to 31 million. Traffic to the ICQ chat site fell 27% to 1.3 million

In August, Netscape traffic fell 22% to 10 million as the site makes the transition from being a portal to being a social news site.

At CNN.com, traffic was off 5% to 21.8 million.

What is becoming increasingly clear from this data and information from other audience sources is that Time Warner and AOL have no "hot" web properties like YouTube or MySpace. It does, almost without question, make distribution of old media content via these websites a less attractive proposition. It also draws into question whether AOL can drive audience growth by migrating away from a subscription-based model.

The data over the next few months should tell the tale.

Douglas McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Nielsen/NetRatings should be out with September numbers for unique visitors to major websites by Tuesday of next week. But, ahead of those numbers, it is informative to look at the Alexa ratings from the website-tracking division of Amazon.com, Inc. They may be a fairly good preview of next week's ratings news.

According to Alexa, AOL.com's ranking among all websites this week is 41st. Its three month average ranking is 36th, which with these kind of audience measurements is not a meaningful difference. The same holds true for CNN.com. Its rank for the current week is 36th and its average rank for the last three months is 31st.

There is more movement among smaller websites where traffic is likely to fluctuate more than it does in the Top 50.

Mapquest, a surprisingly large property, ranks 123rd this week and has a three month average rank of 112th. AIM.com, the home site of AOL Instant Messenger, ranked 355th this week and 335th for its three month average.

ICQ.com, another AOL site for chat and message traffic, rose from 300th place as its three month average to 324th for the week.

The largest drop was for Netscape.com which was changed from an Internet portal to a social news site in July. Its three-month rank is 383rd. Its average rank for the current week is 554th. By contrast, its closest competition, Digg.com, ranked 91st for the last three months and 85th this week.

For reference, the top six websites worldwide as measured by Alexa, are Yahoo!, MSN, Google, Chinese web properties Baidu.com and qq.com, and MySpace. Unlike Nielsen or comScore, Alexa measures individual sites. The other services measure site families, so, in the case of AOL, most of the sites mentioned here would be reported as a group and the overall ranking would be much higher. (comScore has told us that they break out both site families and individual sites.)

Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) and AOL management probably hope that the Nielsen/NetRatings numbers paint a somewhat better picture.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Time Warner's largest web properties were primarily flat year-over-previous-year based on new data from Nielsen Netratings.

The AOL brand, which includes all of AOL's channels including AIM and Moviefone, had a total unique audience of 74,530,000. The number was flat with July 2006, and down slightly from last years August figure of 75,721.000.

The AOL Instant Messenger channel continued to fall. Total unique visitors for August 2006 were 45,669,000. This was down from 47,035,000 in July and 53,504,000 last August.

The AOL Moviefone channel also fell slightly from 11,830,000 in August 2005 to 10,070,000 unique visitors this August. The figure for July was 11,904,000.

The audience for the critical CNN brand was steady. August 2006 had 23,559,000 unique visitors. A year ago, the figure was 23,567,000.

At online community site ICQ, the audience continues to drop rapidly. August has 1,243,000 million "uniques." A year ago, the figure was 1,912,000. The July 2006 figure was 1,408,000.

Netscape continued its year-over-year decline, but moved up some from the immediately previous month. With the shift to a social news site, Netscape had a unique visitor count of 8,248,000 in August, down from 13,175,000 a year ago. In July 2006, the site's audience was 7,811,000.

Some net properties continue to have rapid growth. News Corp unit MySpace had 49 million unique visitors in August, up 139% from last year.

The issue of audience growth, particularly at the websites that are part of the AOL unit, remains critical to the company's strategy of migrating from a subscription-based revenue model to one that relies more on internet advertising. Although Time Warner has not stated it in so many words, it would seem essential that the large AOL properties grow at least as fast as major competitors like MSN, Yahoo! and Google to capture their proportionate share of the growing online ad market.

As I mentioned in my post about Blogher, AIM is where it's at for the sorts of people who use instant messenger programs to communicate. Not only do teenagers love the product, with all the spiraling viral effects that has for AOL, but I use it for work -- and many other businesses are becoming IM-savvy.

AIM, however, may have come to a bit of an innovation plateau -- the unit seems to be focusing on cuteness and personality rather than functionality. AOL needed to get working if the company wished to expand into the nether reaches of instant communication and electronic networking. Today's announcement of the company's acquisition of Userplane (for an undisclosed sum) underscored Time Warner's dual strategies in this market, which are (1) dominate and innovate and (2) do it by acquisition, whenever possible.

Userplane CEO Mike Jones says the company will remain a separate unit, and the company's venture capitalist lauds Userplane for having been cashflow positive "for a long time." Userplane brings a very strong position in the dating and social networking market, and it's oh-so-Web 2.0. According to TechCrunch, Userplane "uses Flash and Ajax to offer video, audio and text chat in the browser, in single or multiple chat rooms. Those video and audio chats can be recorded using the company's Webrecorder application."

Ch-ch-ch-changes are coming to AOL, and analysts analyze them in an AP piece from earlier today. What everyone (especially Gartner's Allen Weiner) wants to know: what about the yellow running man? "Are they going to keep that yellow dude, whatever his name is? ... to me it represents all those unwanted discs," says Weiner.

Time Warner execs say that social networking (AIM Pages) and video sharing will help AOL keep increasing its advertising revenue per page viewed (up a whopping 58% year-over-year), and that free AOL email addresses will keep the pageviews from falling much more than they have to date (down 26% in June). But is an @aol.com email address cool enough to keep those monetizable eyeballs clicking around the company's pages?

I hardly think it's about cool (and it's definitely not about the yellow man). Whether or not customers will stick around for free AOL, and its content, is partially about storage, partially about usability, and partially about not having to change all your settings and send out those messy mass emails. And maybe I'm off base here but I think @aol.com addresses will start having a retro cool. Hey, I'm doing it...

Will AOL turn around and start growing again, or will the company, like analyst Rob Enderle warns, just tread water? In my opinion, it's not about video, social networking, or email at all, but about the IM -- that's where I spend most of my time these days, and where the kids are getting all their media. AIM is still leading that market by a long ways. And the little yellow dude? In AIM, he's alive and well.

Yahoo (YHOO) Inc shares fell by a $1.15, 3.15% to close at $32.23 today.

A Forbes article outlined an RBC investor report ahead of Yahoo's Q2 results to be reported next Tuesday, July 18th. While analyst Jordan Rohan reiterated an "outperform" rating with a target price of $40, he claims "little upside" above his 5.5% q/q growth and 31% y/y growth is expected this quarter, but he also expects revenue growth to surge again, the beginning of next year.

Rohan forecasts $1.15 billion revenue for Yahoo and 14 cents earnings per share. He calls for a modest search-growth and 11.5% for branded advertising, which along with display advertising is what he sees as the highlights of Yahoo! Q2 results. However, as far as margins go, only if Yahoo! managed to increase its margins from 40% to 44%, then Rohan claims it would be able to come at the mid of the earnings guidance range.

In other news today, it was reported that Microsoft (MSFT) Corp. and Yahoo Inc. said they are beginning a limited public test of plans to make their instant messaging systems work together, meaning users of MSN Messenger, or Windows Live, would be able to contact users of Yahoo! Messenger.

This move is most important as just last December AOL agreed to work with Google for a similar option between Google Talk and AIM. However, while Google (GOOG) and AOL haven't set up a time-line for their plans, Microsoft and Yahoo should be able, according to their announcement, to make their messengers interoperable within the next few months.

I was one of those people who got creative to get Gmail. I was working, at the time of the great launch, as the warm-and-fuzzy product development type in a company of unmitigated (and well-connected) geeks. But none of them had Gmail.

I baked an amazing (oh, it was really good) organic chocolate torte and got Gmail. I invited a geek or two. It was crazy, for a bit: you could pay hundreds for a Gmail account. Then, suddenly, the market was saturated and I never got that crocheted purse someone promised me in return for an invite. Ahh well.

Before long it seemed as if everyone had Gmail. But it turns out that even more of you have AIM Webmail, at least, more in the first year of the product's availability: so say my big bosses at today's AOL all-hands meeting. It's odd, really: it's clear that many products are more successful than Google's forays. More customers, more mainstream acceptance, more ad dollars. But everything Google touches is just cooler. I mean, no one's offering me even a mini-cupcake to get into AIM webmail.

I'd rather be profitable than cool anyday. But it seems investors? They prefer the cool.