• The New York Times, Wednesday, December 5, 2007 10:48 AM

Google's $1 billion investment in AOL, which valued the Time Warner company at $20 billion, might not have been the most financially prudent in its history. However, the companies announced a cross-instant messaging partnership that will allow GoogleTalk users to have IM conversations with their AOL Instant Messenger buddies inside Gmail, Google's email service.

IM is one of the few areas of the Web where AOL could claim market leadership. Which makes it a particularly landmark move for Google, because Talk hasn't been nearly as big a hit. Even after the search giant integrated the app into its popular Gmail service, GoogleTalk never came close to standing alongside MSN, Yahoo and AOL, the giants of instant messaging.

IM might even be AOL's single most valuable asset. That said, the company has never seemed to monetize it properly. While extending social networking services to the app's hundreds of millions of users might have seemed like a good idea, AIM Pages simply never caught on, and was left in the dust by MySpace and Facebook.

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