There has been no shortage of talk about the apparent demise of Userplane, the text, voice and video chat software provider that was acquired by AOL in August 2006 for around $40 million (the exact price was never disclosed).

Venturebeat ran a story on the property last May, citing sources and Userplane clients as saying the service had been “neglected if not abandoned by AOL”. Yet this morning, I exchanged some e-mails with Darin Ohlandt, General Manager of Userplane, and he responded to the rumors saying they are definitely not shutting down and will continue to offer the existing chat and IM services to third-party sites.

However, some writing on the wall suggests he may not be painting a complete picture of what is going on.

There’s been a lot of talk the past few days since the launch of the iPhone 3.0 software about the lack of Push Notification apps in the App Store. Well, today brings a big one: AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).

Instant messaging apps are perhaps the perfect use for Push Notification, which allows you to use such services without requiring that they be open at all time. In our test of the pre-release beta version of the AIM app with Push, the messages were sent almost instantaneously. In testing it out right now, it looks to be just as fast.

AOL’s new political news and blog site, PoliticsDaily.com has surpassed rival Politico.com in unique visits in May, after being launched only a month and a half ago. According to May’s comScore results, PoliticsDaily.com received 2.4 million unique visitors compared to 1.1 million unique visitors on Politico.com in May. PoliticsDaily, a “news magazine” site which primarily focuses on in-depth political commentary as opposed to breaking news, provides only original content, from long-form analysis to blog posts on issues in the U.S. political landscape. You can read our original review of PoliticsDaily here.

This is a big deal for AOL and representative of the company’s ambitions to become a dominant player in the online content space. PoliticsDaily is the brainchild of Martin Moe, senior vice president at AOL and is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. MediaGlow, which recently launched topic directory Love.com, runs AOL News, Engadget and TMZ.com, among other properties.

When your main seed investor becomes the CEO of AOL, it does have its fringe benefits. Today, AOL announced its acquisition of two local startups: Patch and Going. AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong is a seed investor in Patch, which offers hyperlocal news for small towns and communities. In a note he sent out today to employees, which we’ve obtained from AOL, he notes that he recused himself from the acquisition negotiations and that instead of profiting from the deal he asked to get his initial seed investment back in AOL stock when it goes public. Going is a local event and entertainment listing site based in Boston which raised a $5 million Series A in 2007. Both acquisitions were in the single-digit millions.

Below is Armstrong’s email to employees, discussing the reason for the acquisitions, which is to ramp up AOL’s local presence (one of five main strategies he is pursuing):

Earlier today, Apple sent out an email (embedded below) to developers who are testing the latest iPhone 3.0 software, asking them to help do one final stress test the new Push Notification service. The app picked for this test was AOL’s AIM instant messaging application, which makes sense given that IM apps are likely to be the apps that end up using Push Notification the most.

Push Notification, for those who haven’t been following news about it for the past year, is the system Apple developed to alleviate the fact that it won’t allow third party apps to run in the background of the iPhone. Apple claims there are security concerns, battery life concerns and performance concerns that prevent background apps from being feasible at this time on the iPhone (though the company is considering ways to do background apps in the future). Instead, it has asked developers to use its servers to push out certain tasks (like IMs) that come to your phone even when that application isn’t running.

Are you tired of all the depressing headlines every day about bombings, layoffs, and financial collapse? Sears sure is. Its “Life. Well Spent.” ad campaign just doesn’t work next to downbeat stories. What if there was a news site that only ran good news? Well, that wouldn’t really be a news site, but Sears decided to create one anyway in partnership with AOL News. It is called Good News Now, or GNN.

There you will find feel-good stories such as “Senior Couple Ties the Knot,” “Lucky Boy Discovers Seven-Leaf Clover,” and “Tourist Survives Dangerous Train Ride.” Topics you can explore further include “Heroes, Winners,” “Upbeat News,” and “More Good News.” You can barf now.

Last month Time Warner announced that it would likely spin off its AOL assets into a new company, followed by an IPO (10Q SEC filing is here). Little detail was given about the transaction, other than the fact that Google’s 5% stake in AOL would be repurchased. But exactly when the transaction would occur, and what assets it would include, were left unstated. New CEO Tim Armstrong will lead the independent company.

Sources close to AOL tell us that the board of directors will make a final decision on the AOL spinoff at a board meeting this Thursday, May 28, possibly undoing the $147 billion 2001 merger of the two companies. Sources characterize the decision as “a done deal.”

The big question is whether AOL’s dial up access business will remain with AOL. Last year Time Warner was in discussions to sell it to Earthlink. The dial up business continues to decay - at one time AOL had 26.7 million dial up subscribers, but it has fallen to just 6.9 million today. Still, it’s a nearly $2 billion business that brings in, sources say, around $1 billion in free cash to AOL. At current decay rates the business will peter out in another couple of years, but for now it’s an important way for AOL to finance growth (more on that in a post later today). Our sources say the dialup business will become part of the new AOL entity.

Total AOL revenues in 2008 were $4.2 billion, a 20% drop from 2007. AOL had $867 million in revenue and $150 million in operating income for the first quarter of 2009.

It was the last part of the advertising sector to fall and may be the first to recover, but online advertising is now in a recession. With the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) having reported March quarter financials, we can get a pretty good sense of how the sector did as a whole. If you add up the online advertising revenues of these four online advertising bellwethers, the total online advertising revenues for the quarter came to $7.9 billion, a 2 percent decline from a year ago and a 7 percent decline from the fourth quarter.

The growth of online advertising has been slowing down for a while, but this is the first quarter to experience an actual decline in revenues. Given the poor performance reported by all of these companies during the quarter, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Only Google was able to eke out any annual growth, the rest all saw online advertising revenues drop. The fact that Google’s advertising revenues represents 68 percent of the total and that it saw modest growth helped to dampen the overall decline.

With AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong in place, the game of musical chairs is under way. The first big departure being announced today is AOL’s head of sales Greg Coleman, who only joined in February, 2009 from Yahoo. Replacing him is Jeff Levick, who worked under Armstrong at Google as VP of Industry Development and Marketing in North America. Levick’s new title at AOL will be President, Global Advertising and Strategy, where he wlil be in charge of AOL’s ad network Platform-A.

Coleman was not Armstrong’s hire and obviously he wants his own man in such a key position. Advertising revenues were down 20 percent in the first quarter. Armstrong needs to right the AOL ship before Time Warner can spin it off, which it is planning on doing.

Time Warner announced first quarter earnings today, giving us a peak at how AOL is doing. It’ seen better days. Revenues were down 23 percent to $867 million. Of that advertising revenues made up about half ($443 million), but were down a gut-wrenching 20 percent. Yahoo, in comparison, saw a 12 percent decline in advertising revenues during the quarter, and Google saw 6 percent growth in total revenues on an annual basis. Even Microsoft did better on the online advertising front, suffering a smaller 16 percent drop in the quarter.

Also revealed in the 10Q filing with the SEC is Time Warner’s intention to separate the old dial-up access business and spin off the rest of AOL:

While AOL was officially launching its Socialthing for Websites initiative this morning, it was also quietly making some changes to the design of its homepage. There are some new themes, Twitter integration, a prominent RSS tab up top, and all the information and news modules are now collapsible. There are also a few new AOL content featured along teh left-hand column, such as Paw Nation and PoliticsDaily (see our review).

But if you haven’t been to AOL.com lately (you are not alone), you may not completely recognize it. For one thing, there is a lifestreaming box on the right that lets you log into various social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and MySpcace. You can see all of the status updates from your friends on other social networks and respond to them from within AOL. AIM and Bebo are also options in that box, but for Bebo you have to click an arrow to even see it (and AOL owns Bebo).

A couple weeks ago, I spotted the reincarnation of Socialthing on AOL’s country-music Website TheBoot and speculated that it would potentially be rolled out across AOL’s other MediaGlow properties as well. Today, a press release from AOL in my inbox confirms that MediaGlow “is in the process of deploying Socialthing across its network of more than 75 sites.”

Socialthing started out as a Friendfeed competitor when AOL bought it last year. It never came out of private beta, but its lifestreaming service found its way into Bebo, the social network AOL purchased for $850 million. Now, with Socialthing for Websites, AOL is combining it with AIM to compete with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. As I wrote in my last post, Socialthing for Websites offers a single sign-in for participating Websites. Right now it accepts your AIM or AOL username and password, but will soon add Bebo, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo and OpenID using OAuth.

AOL is adding a twist to old-fashioned political journalism with the launch of its new political news and blog site, PoliticsDaily.com. The site, which will primarily focus on in-depth political commentary as opposed to breaking news, will only provide original content, from long-form analysis to blog posts on issues in the U.S. political landscape. Led by former New York Times Washington Correspondent, Melinda Henneberger, PoliticsDaily wants to tie the old media’s in-depth political analysis with a sustainable digital medium

PoliticsDaily is the brainchild of Martin Moe, senior vice president at AOL and is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. MediaGlow, which recently launched topic directory Love.com, runs AOL News, Engadget and TMZ.com, among other properties. PoliticsDaily is part of the AOL News network, which received more than 27 million unique visitors in March, according to comScore stats. New York Times Digital by comparison had close to 46 million unique visitors in March.

AOL has a new content site in open beta called Love.com - it’s been live since early this month but hasn’t attracted any press attention to date. AOL hasn’t announced it, and it isn’t linked to from any other AOL properties. But it’s already a vast site covering 350,000 topics that attracts 100,000 unique visitors a week through search engine links and word of mouth on Twitter, Facebook and other sites.

The site has a home directory at love.com, and topic sites are organized under subdomains. Current content on literally anything you can think of (or at least that I could think of) is there: dogs, The Beatles, sex, money, rock and roll. Hamsters. Barack Obama. You get the picture. Search engines love this stuff.

The site is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. The content is all automated, with main articles pulled from third party sources via Relegence, videos from YouTube, Twitter messages linking back to individual pages, and links to major news sites. All of this is automated and requires very little human involvement.

If you want to take a peek at how AOL plans to take on Facebook, you need to look beyond Bebo (the social network it bought for $850 million last year) to theBoot, a country music site hidden away off in a corner of AOL Music. A very interesting experiment is going on at theBoot that represents a major plank in AOL’s social-networking strategy. It shows how AOL plans to take on Facebook Connect, which is Facebook’s way of letting other Websites tap into its members and their activity streams.

AOL is adding its own twist to spreading activity streams across the Web through a combination of its SocialThing lifestreaming service (which it bought last year and was recently rolled out inside of Bebo) and AIM chat. It is called Socialthing for Websites.

AOL’s Propeller launched in 2006 as a “Digg Killer” - a Digg like site with editorial oversight that had massive netscape.com traffic directed to it. All those Netscape users were used to seeing a standard news page, though, and didn’t quite know what to do at the new site.

A variety of changes were made over time, including paying news submitters to lure them from Digg, changing the name to Propeller.com, and occasional layoffs. They even added a mascot. But nothing has stopped the decline of the site, and now AOL is appealing to previous users to come and give it another try.

A year ago 4.6 million people a month visited the site (Comscore worldwide). Now its 2.1 million, more than a 50% decline in unique visitors. Page views have also dropped by 50%, to just 6 million/month. Revenue is likely in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars per month at best, meaning that it is almost certainly costing AOL money to keep the lights on at the site.

It’s pretty clear that Propeller is a candidate to enter the deadpool, although the upside is the people working on it could go to more interesting projects at AOL. But they’re not giving up just yet. In an email to registered users who haven’t signed in recently (that would be me), Propeller General Manager Tom Drapeau said:

In the midst of the recession, consumers are either cutting back on spending or actively looking to reduce expenses. And with retail sales plunging during March, decreasing by 1.1% compared to February, it looks like retailers are in for the long haul when its comes to the virtual drought in consumer spending. What better time for AOL to completely overhaul the design of its comparison shopping site, AOL Shopping, to promote recession-friendly deals, coupons and sales to consumers across its site. Coincidentally, Yahoo’s comparison shopping site, Yahoo! Shopping, has the same features, but wrapped up in a different interface.

AOL Shopping’s homepage showcases a “monthly specials” slideshow, featured prominently above the fold of the site. Users can click on to a “monthly specials” page with the best deals of the month, up-to-date coupons and sales, or they can flip through the slideshow to see AOL’s recommendations for what products have the best deals. For April, AOL says televisions, appliances and cookware are your best bets. Also, each page on the site displays coupons to the right side of the page, which are fairly random and don’t correspond to what you are looking at on the page. For example, I was doing a search for “Tory Burch Flats,” and was shown a coupon for pet supplies at Petco.

In a recent post, Sarah Lacy posed the question of whether Israel has lost its mojo. It looks like AOL believes the mojo is still very much somewhere in the Holy Land, as evidenced by its tapping Avichay Nissenbaum as AOL’s first Country Manager for Israel.

Nissenbaum, considered by Israel’s startup community as “one of the good guys” is known for two startup successes:product lifecycle management company SmarTeam which was acquired by Dassault Systemes back in 1999, and most recently, Q&A site Yedda which was acquired by AOL in 2007.

AOL’s People Networks division has today announced the launch of social networking site Bebo, which it acquired almost exactly one year ago, in several key European countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.

Before, Bebo was only available in English and for some reason also Polish, but now it will use IP-based geo-targetting to cater services in users’ mother tongues. It launched a latino site for U.S.-based users just last week.

Successfully rolling out social services across Europe is never an easy feat to accomplish, and Netlog and Facebook have a pretty strong foothold here, as does MySpace, although the latter appears to be struggling with their expansion strategy lately. Bebo is doing it the smart way - which is of course no guarantee for success - by teaming up with local media partners.

Breaking: AOL has named a new CEO and chairman. Tim Armstrong, who headed up ad sales in North America for Google, will replace Randy Falco as chairman and CEO. AOL President and COO Ron Grant will also be leaving the company. Armstrong’s name has been bandied about as a potential CEO or top executive at several companies. He takes on a challenging post at AOL, which does not have the strength of either Google or even Yahoo in terms of advertising assets or traffic.

This was a very closely held hiring, say our sources - even top execs at AOL weren’t told about Falco’s leaving until just before the press release went out earlier this afternoon.

Falco came from NBC when his predecessor Jonathan Miller was kicked out. Falco reorganized AOL, focusing on combining its portal (which still generates a huge amount of traffic) with its advertising assets—now bundled together under Platform-A. His strategy was to make AOL an ad network, with AOL’s own properties serving as a foundation and source of guaranteed inventory.

But the advertising strategy never quite took hold. Partly, that was because the economy blew up. Last quarter, advertising revenues at AOL were down 18 percent, total revenues were down 23 percent, and the company took a $2.2 billion writedown for previous acquisitions. Yahoo, however, saw only a 2 percent decline in display advertising during the same quarter, and a one percent decline in overall revenues. Google’ revenues, meanwhile, grew 18 percent. powered by search advertising. Armstrong was responsible for a big chunk of that revenue, and his expertise in the still-growing part of online advertising—search—no doubt made him a big catch for Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes.

AOL definitely has a sales issue, as is clear by its relative performance to Yahoo and Google. And Armstrong is seen as someone who can help solve that, along with another recent hire, Greg Coleman from Yahoo. Coleman is the new head of sales at AOL. But what would entice Armstrong to leave Google, especially if he was the beneficiary of some of the recently repriced options?

Time Warner wants to get rd of AOL. It was looking to sell it outright, but now it is gearing up more for an eventual spin-off. If Armstrong can get AOL in shape for an IPO or make it attractive enough for a buyout offer from Microsoft or some other acquirer, he will get his payday.

The press release is after the jump: