Bloggers, industry critics, even Time Warner insiders have been talking up an AOL spin off for years. Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, it looks as though Time Warner management is finally paving the way for this to become reality. Aside from hiring new Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong, Time Warner this week announced that it would transfer $12.3 billion of AOL debt to HBO, "effectively lifting a weight from the business and enabling (AOL) to move off on its own," says CNet's Caroline McCarthy. Bondholders have until the end of the day on April 15 to provide …

Facebook has been "a remarkable success as a social network" but not so much as a business, notes Forbes writer Taylor Buley. The social networking giant has 200 million worldwide users, 11 offices around the globe, and more than 800 employees. "Operating at such a large scale isn't cheap," says Buley; insiders tell him the company's burn rate is over $200 million per year. Even if it were half that figure, Buley suggests the company would need to seek additional funding. How could Facebook raise $100 million? Buley uses the company's own advertising tool to estimate how many ad impressions …

FriendFeed, a social media aggregator that tracks activity across different platforms and lets users subscribe to one another, "is in danger of becoming the coolest application that no one uses," says Michael Arrington. The service allows photos, videos, blog posts and anything else that's published using an RSS feed to be viewed by anyone who wants to subscribe to you. "All in all, it's a service that should be bound for success," says Arrington, but instead, it is Twitter, FriendFeed's competitor, that is getting all the attention. And rightly so. According to comScore, Twitter is growing at approximately 33% per …

PaidContent's Staci Kramer interviews mad-as-hell MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton about his company's new initiative to better control the use of news industry content online. In a nutshell, Singleton says that print isn't going away, advertising can no longer carry the industry's weight, and online pay models may be coming soon. "I think our industry has been very timid about protecting our content, probably because we've done so well in the past few years that we didn't recognize that misappropriation is as serious an issue as it is," Singleton says. As we're now reexamining our business models, it's become clear …

Kara Swisher says The Associated Press' announcement that it will aggressively pursue aggregators of its content is an initiative to "stop the Internet from being the Internet." In other words, it won't work. In an interview with PaidContent.org's Staci Kramer, MediaNews group CEO Dean Singleton lays out a curious metaphor about content: "Print is still the meat. Online's the salt and pepper," he says. Actually, "online is increasingly the sizzle," says Swisher, and Singleton left out a very important point: "it's the consumer doing the grilling." She adds: "Thus, it goes without saying that the meat could be in danger …

Facebook is testing a new virtual gifts program in which users give each other "credits" for posting messages or status updates that they like. For example, if I write "going to L.A. for the weekend" on my status update, my friends can choose to throw a few credits my way. One dollar buys you 100 credits. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington says the project is "doomed to fail," because there's no obvious "real world parallel" to giving virtual credits offline. Facebook already has a virtual gifts product that allow users to send images of cupcakes on birthdays for around $1, but even …

New sources corroborate last Friday's report in TechCrunch that Google is in talks to buy Twitter. However, according to these sources, Google's internal valuation of the microblogging service is at "a token premium" above its last round of financing, or around $250 million. Some employees desperately want a deal, but the TechCrunch sources said that Twitter CEO Evan Williams wouldn't even sell for $1 billion. "He may blink but he wouldn't do it," said one source. Of course, the other problem is that Twitter might be viewed as a search-related acquisition, inviting more antitrust scrutiny for Google. Clearly, talks are …

Web companies have a pretty poor track record when it comes to M&A. In a research note a few weeks back, Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay noted several examples, including AOL-Netscape, AOL-Bebo, Yahoo-Flickr, Yahoo-Broadcast.com, even Google-YouTube. In the note, Lindsay advised the likes of Google and Microsoft to stay away from Twitter and other pre-business model startups. Following Friday's speculation that buying Twitter is exactly what Google intends to do, Lindsay reiterates his claim in a new research note, saying that Internet companies should stop buying startups with no visible means of supporting themselves and should instead give their excess …