AOL is expected to complete mass layoffs after its spinoff from Time Warner is complete, supposedly by the end of this year. But it sounds like some cuts are too obvious to wait. One hundred firings is modest for a company of around 6,000 workers; AOL continues to work on "Project Everest" to plan the rest, our tipster said. If you know more, email us.

UPDATE: Kara Swisher at All Things D, who has written two books on AOL, was told by her sources that 100 or so layoffs are indeed coming down today. PaidContent later reported likewise.

Meanwhile Electronic Arts is laying off 17 percent of its workforce after the company saw net sales drop 12 percent from the prior year. Which, if you think about the state of the economy, is bizarre: Why aren't you unemployed people out there buying more videogames? Staying home is cheap.

(Image via Zazzle t-shirt/sticker)

In her job promoting YouTube to corporations, Kovner did get some camera time, like in the video attached to this post by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And the former Yale cheerleader was presumably able to spread some of her inner joy while attending various events around town. But Google did not afford Kovner any chance to indulge her longtime passion for singing — until now.

There's no word yet on whether the marketer/vocalist's new gig at AOL might allow for a few choice solos. But if not, Kristin, we have just one word for you: Broadway.

Kovner's goodbye video is above, and her goodbye email follows below.

Armstrong, the former Google advertising chief (pictured), jettisoned some top lieutenants from AOL, the internet conglomerate, last month. Beyond that, he's believed to be planning major job cuts as part of a sweeping reorganization of the company. "AOL is not going to change itself by incremental movements," Armstrong recently told PaidContent. Asked if this meant "large cuts," he talked about going "deep into the employee organization... to come up with ways to structure the company... I would expect announcements about that by early next year."

Early next year would mean just after the spinoff from Time Warner, assuming it goes forward as expected late this year. An AOLer who attended a recent internal "Town Hall" meeting on the restructuring, dubbed Project Everest, confirmed the layoffs are planned for post-spinoff.

One explanation we've heard for that timing is that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes didn't want layoffs taking place while AOL was part of his company. That makes some sense — layoffs typically carry a price tag, and Time Warner presumably doesn't want to take the hit for a move that will benefit another company over the long term. Time Warner isn't taking on debt as part of the transaction, our AOL tipster said, which jibes with the media conglomerate's statements that it is AOL that might load up on debt as part of the spinoff.

But a delayed deep restructuring means uncertainty for investors considering what to do with AOL shares in the earliest days of tradubg, which in turn means a potentially depressed price. A weak re-debut for AOL shares would not bode well for a company that has already had more than its share of struggles. Then again, if anyone can sell uncertainty, it's a consummate salesman like Armstrong.

UPDATE: 3:38 pm ET: Post updated with comments from an AOLer.

By selling her a vision of online media moguldom, in which Elisabeth Murdoch (pictured) would conquer the one medium that still thwarts her father's ambitions, the internet. Under the arrangement, Elisabeth's media company Shine will invest in Shields' content startup, Kara Swisher of All Things D reports, helping launch a new player in the hot online video space. Murdoch, to her credit, conceived the idea to import The Office and Pop Idol to America. But she's also a sucker for charmers: Her "close friend" and sometime yacht guest Ben Silverman unloaded his production company, Reveille, onto Shine for a cool $125 million. The Australia-born mogul-in-the-making should hope her new partner does not similarly boomerang.

That deal seemed smart when Silverman was an NBC honcho in a position to steer business Elisabeth Murdoch's way, but now he's been ousted — and is all set to compete with Murdoch with the online video startup he's building for Barry Diller's IAC.

Armstrong, the former golden boy of Google's advertising side, was hired just this past spring and has long been expected to initiate a massive restructuring. In his memo, he discusses a strategy session that nailed down where, exactly, the company is going. He also confirms his first two firings, reported previously by Business Insider: longtime company execs Kim Partoll, the COO, and Local, Mapping and Search boss John Kannapell. Both were hired shortly after AOL's disastrous merger with Time Warner.



He also mentions a "Project Everest:"

We have a strong strategy and we need to be laser focused on execution. We are planning another video update next week with a progress report on Project Everest, and I look forward to seeing you all then.

We look forward to that video, too! Full memo:

Amid his company's spinoff from Time Warner, CEO Tim Armstrong has been focusing AOL more on online content — blogs, videos, that sort of thing. One of his first announcements: a deal to distribute "purpose-driven" Web videos featuring "animated versions of Warren Buffett, Martha Stewart at age 10, supermodel Gisele Bündchen, and the late Carl Sagan," PaidContent reports.

In Secret Millionaire's Club, Buffet will mentor a group of kids on how to blow 31 percent of market value and a AAA credit rating in one year using derivatives and writing risky catastrophic insurance policies. In Little Martha, meanwhile, Martha Stewart will run an event-planning company from a treehouse, seeded with profits from insider trading. Sounds like fun for the whole family!

• Leading news websites saw traffic surge to 4.2 million visitors per minute from around 2.75 million visitors per minute, according to Akamai.
  
• CNN's traffic grew fivefold in one hour and the site clocked 20 million pageviews.
• Twitter had its biggest spike in traffic, to 5,000 tweets per second, since Barack Obama's election as president, according to co-founder Biz Stone.
  
• Facebook status updates tripled.
  
• AOL Instant Messenger went down for 40 minutes.
  
• TMZ, which broke the news of Jackson's death, crashed several times amid a surge of traffic.
  
• The LA Times, which got early confirmation of the death, went down, as well.
• For about half an hour, Michael Jackson queries weren't working on Google News.
  
• Wikipedia froze amid an edit war on Jackson's page.

Consider, first, that AOL is buying Armstrong out of what sounds like a dud company — the sort of startup that can devour an investor's equity entirely.

Armstrong's Patch is a "hyperlocal" news website, mixing reporting from its own journalists with contributions from volunteers. Though it's had precious few successes, citizen journalism remains notoriously tricky from an editorial standpoint, to say nothing of profitability. And Patch has been ambushed with some formidable competition: The New York Times rolled out its own local blogging effort in the exact three communities where Patch debuted.

For this, AOL paid around $10 million, helping Armstrong recoup his otherwise imperiled seed investment?

Then there's the question of AOL's real interest. It's far more likely the company bought Patch to nail down Armstrong than out of some sudden resurgence of interest in local news (as Kara Swisher of All Things D notes, AOL had already been down this road with Digital City and CityGuide).

AOL wanted to hire Armstrong from Google just a couple of months before AOL detached from Time Warner. There would have been negotiations. And what better time for savvy salesman Armstrong to mention his growing interest in Patch than when AOL hoped to focus his attention elsewhere? "Distracted by Patch? We'll take it off your hands for you."

That sort of arrangement wouldn't be particularly transparent for AOL shareholders, who should know where compensation ends and strategic investments begin. But presumably Armstrong can lead them to the same conclusion as his former bosses: That he's worth every penny.

Business Insider hears Coleman netted $3 million severance for his 10 weeks work for the company. That's about $60,000 per workday, assuming he didn't come in on weekends.

Maybe that sounds like yet another example of outrageous executive compensation. But we don't begrudge Coleman his money: He fell victim to a similar palace coup at Yahoo when yet another of his bosses was replaced. Kudos to Coleman for being smart enough to hedge his bets this time around with a severance deal, which he presumably insisted on up front.

As George W. Bush famously said, "Fool me once... shame on... shame on you... Fool me — You can't get fooled again."

The Wall Street Journal's Matthew Karnitschnig imagines the company, including the still-proud journalists at Time Inc., as the pet of Rupert Murdoch, or perhaps of some dreary cable television provider like Comcast or DirecTV.

Maybe. As troubled as the AOL division was, it at least hypothetically had growth potential Time Warner's remaining divisions don't offer. But it's safe to say Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes (pictured) isn't going to sell to Murdoch without some ironclad protection against getting shanked by Murdoch's MySpace CEO Jon Miller, who Bewkes has repeatedly screwed over.

In retrospect, AOL's deal to acquire — and then be run by — Time Warner marked the end of a century when old media conglomerates were at their peak. The merger, valued at $182 billion when it was announced, was the largest in U.S. history. It is also arguably the most disastrous in history. The combined value of the two companies — both inflated by the dot-com bubble — was $350 billion. Today, before the spin-off goes through, the whole shebang sports a market cap of just under $28 billion.

Now that the struggling old media company is parting ways with its fast-shrinking internet toy, the media's hand-wringing over the deal nine years ago looks absurdly hubristic in retrospect.

Here are some quotes from early 2000, after the deal was announced (and about a year before it was consummated):

• New York Times: A "merger of tree-snapping behemoths... the Godzilla of the Internet... wed the King Kong of content. It is a natural time for the other denizens of the jungle to wonder what the future will hold for the colossal couple and the world they inhabit."
  
• USA Today: "It's one of those rare events that seems to change the world overnight... We're shocked... "
  
• Newsweek: "AOL Time Warner will be unchallenged in its online customer base and hold vast cable-television assets."
• Regional telco SBC Communications, as quoted in CBS Marketwatch: "The merger will establish, through a web of equity and contractual interests, one interlocking conglomerate with control over both the high-speed pipes consumers use to connect to the Internet and the content they access once they're online."
• Salon, April Fool's Day: "AOL Time Warner announced Friday that it had acquired France."

There were some pessimists; a columnist named Paul Krugman wrote that only time would tell about the wisdom of the deal, and that it's possible " some big businessmen have just made a very big mistake."

Instead of fearsome tentacles everywhere, Time Warner is now left with the old-line business it was in before the 2000 deal. Except those assets — cable networks, a movie studio, magazines — now face more obstacles to growth than they did eight years ago.

AOL chief Tim Armstrong, the former Google sales chief, finally has his own company to run; it remains to be seen whether he can reverse AOL's steadily declining advertising revenues. But it's Time Warner that's left with the tougher job: Proving media conglomerates can still post impressive growth amid the rise of online media consumption.

I still remember the day I called you up and tried to recruit you to Valleywag — only to learn that that sneaky rapscallion Nick Denton had beaten me to the punch by one whole day in offering you the night shift at Gawker. It all worked out in the end — and perhaps better than I could have imagined back in 2007. But the main lesson I take away from that is that you can get Denton to do pretty much whatever you want if you're patient enough.

Denton, who has a weakness for idle truisms, likes to say that gossip is a young man's game. But you're old enough to remember the first dotcom bubble, and how it popped. That's going to be key in the next few years. We may escape a depression, but Silicon Valley is facing a reckoning nonetheless. Too much venture capital chased too few idea for far too long — and a buoyant economy can no longer hide the startup factory's mistakes.

The biggest mistake you can make is getting too close to your Valley sources and fall for their groupthink in order to ingratiate yourself. (You know how I've scolded you for gullibly buying the hype that Twitter is an amazing source of real-time news. Okay, perhaps it was — for five seconds, before the blowhards, spammers, and self-promoters found it.) At least your schooling will help you remain an outsider: As a Berkeley grad, you'll have an instinctive dislike for the Valley's Stanford in-crowd.

At the same time, don't forget that your years living, studying, and working in the Bay Area give you a better understanding of your beat than anyone can have from 3,000 miles away. Gabriel and Nick, though well-intentioned, have the Manhattan media habit of confusing proximity with relevance. Gawker is much more than New York now — and Valleywag's unique place therein must be firmly grounded in northern California's shaky soil.

Remember: Love is far more powerful than hate. Keep a clear-eyed passion for the Valley. Most tech reporters here secretly loathe their subjects, but try to disguise it with a supine gladhandery as they beg for scoops about new startup website features. They hate themselves and the people they write about. Sad, right? By loving the Valley, you can write about it more honestly than any of them. Just prepare to have your heart broken again, and again, and again. To truly love something, you must love it with all its failings.

For example, the Valley's Alice-in-Wonderland economics — why is Twitter worth more than most startups precisely because it has no revenues to speak of? But the thing you must love most about Silicon Valley — the part of the story the local press corps always skips over in favor of buzzwords, punditry, and lazy analysis — is its people.

The Valley's story is not one of chips and code. It is not a tale of technology. It is the always-running tragicomedy of the people who make technology.

Here are a few characters to watch. I hope it helps — but I can't wait to see who you add to the list.

Marissa Mayer Valleywag's first story remains its best. The public face of Google, Mayer also runs search, the only business that matters there. The cupcake frosting of her girly image — one she assiduously advances at every opportunity — may humanize the otherwise robotic computer scientist. But it is a distraction. The real question to ask about Mayer: Does her spreadsheet-ridden management style scale to new problems beyond search? Are her strengths now turning into limitations?

Mark Zuckerberg Ignore the nerd façade. Facebook's 25-year-old CEO is headstrong and ruthless. Here's the grand irony of Zuckerberg's revolutionary venture: He claims to be all about openness and sharing. But his imperious, my-way-or-the-highway management style has created a fractious culture of dishonesty, delusion, and disillusionment at the social network. His underlings either learn to say things they don't believe, or they move on. This is why Sheryl Sandberg is exactly the wrong COO for Zuckerberg. The veteran of the Clinton Administration has forgotten her Google training and reverted to Washington-player form, where staying on message is all that counts. Facebook's best hope is that Zuckerberg learns from his mistakes — but first he has to recognize them as mistakes.

Carol Bartz Yahoo's CEO swears like a sailor. At last, a boss who has found the right language to describe Yahoo's plight! Bartz brings a refreshing frankness to Yahoo. But the already demoralized troops she inherited will need to start seeing results. Otherwise, Valleywag will continue to be a steady recipient of leaks from Sunnyvale.

Elon Musk The CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX is living the geek high life, playing with fast cars, rocket ships, and other people's money. It's wonderful that Musk has realized even a small part of his childhood fantasies. But he risks destroying his dreams by refusing to reconcile them with reality. Factcheck everything Musk says. For example, was he actually running either Zip2 or PayPal, the previous dotcom successes he likes to cite in his bio, when they were sold?

Owen Van Natta Everyone is going to give MySpace's new CEO a pass, because the so-called "social portal" is so clearly troubled. If the former Facebook executive succeeds in a turnaround, it will be viewed as an astonishing achievement; if he fails, people will say no one could save MySpace. That's not fair. Hold his feet to the fire, and judge this disturbingly tan rock-star boss like anyone else on the list.

Peter Thiel Thiel, the PayPal cofounder, likes to brag about how he recruits only the best brains from the best schools to work at Clarium Capital, his hedge fund. Oh, really? Take a look at their résumés on LinkedIn. Like so many of this outspokenly harebrained libertarian's theses, the claim sounds good on paper but doesn't stand up to inspection. Valleywag, alone in Silicon Valley, can take a keen look at Thiel's rhetoric without being dazzled by his inflated wealth.

Tim Armstrong Like Van Natta at MySpace, Armstrong, a Google golden boy now charged with running AOL, will be enjoying a honeymoon. Don't worry: There are plenty of disgruntled AOLers who will gladly help you break up the lovefest.

Jimmy Wales Remind me: What does Wikipedia's founder actually do to earn his keep, besides give speeches? In all this time, I was never able to figure that out. Maybe you can!

Eric Schmidt When did Google's CEO turn into such a raging egomaniac? When the blogosphere was the only corner of the Internet that criticized him, he dismissed it as a "cesspool." But now everyone from Hollywood to the New York Times to the Federal Trade Commission is looking askance at his online empire's practices. "Don't be evil" has turned into "don't get caught." He will, though. Be ready when he does.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin Google's wonder twins have achieved geek nirvana, creating a cloistered campus with free food, lava lamps, and exercise balls to spare. They have a fleet of jets to transport them to rocket launches or rendezvous with Richard Branson and Bono. They've even managed to get married and reproduce. Just one question: Are they still sane? Were they ever?

There are many people who will help you — many of the same people who helped me so much, I hope. They include:

• Nick Denton, for putting up with three years of playing hard to get — and then putting up with much more besides.
• Brian Lam, Choire Sicha, Noah Robischon and Lockhart Steele, for tag-teaming me into taking the job.
• Gabriel Snyder, for expertly steering Valleywag into Gawker's welcoming arms.
• All the Valleywaggers: Paul Boutin, Nick Douglas, Megan McCarthy, Tim Faulkner, Mary Jane Irwin, Jordan Golson, Nicholas Carlson, Jackson West, Melissa Gira Grant, and Tim Woolery. You guys, we've been through so much together!
• Richard Blakeley: We made sweet Photoshop magic together.
• Everyone at Gawker Media: How much do I love you? Far more than just five milligrams.
• Sarah Lacy, Kara Swisher, and Peter Kafka: My peers and fellow purveyors of Valley gossip, you constantly inspired me.
• Countless sources, tipsters, and fellow scribes: Please understand that I esteem you none the less for not naming you here. In fact, your continued anonymity is the best sign of my abiding affection.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Good luck, Ryan. I'll be reading eagerly.

Don't screw it up.

Yours,

Owen
The Valleywag

(Photos by Brian Solis and Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Armstrong's first day is April 7, but according to our source, he's had his eye on the startup for a while: "He's apparently loved it ever since Google, and it would make AOL instantly cool again, since we don't have anything good except for TMZ."

It's not clear if there are any talks, just rumors of Armstrong's desire to get his hands on Twitter. He shares that apparent interest with his former colleagues at Google, who are in the process of getting collectively shamed into some kind of Twitter partnership or acquisition by Silicon Valley's Twitter-happy punditocracy. In that field, though, Armstrong has an advantage: When it comes to buying things merely for their perceived coolness, AOL is absolutely shameless.

Falco and Grant were almost instantly hated when they arrived at AOL's Dulles campus — partly because Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes badly mishandled the exit of former CEO Jonathan Miller. (Miller is now a venture capitalist, and both his name and Armstrong's came up as candidates in Yahoo's CEO search.)

Armstrong, head of Google's North American ad sales, seems like the best possible man for the job — and with Google's shares hovering around $323, down more than 50 percent from their peak, and AOL at the nadir of its tumultuous existence, it seems like a good time for him to prove what he can do.

He benefits from an easy comparison: Falco's reign at AOL, where the company's notional value sank from $20 billion to a fraction of that, will go down in history as one of the worst reigns as CEO at any company, anywhere.

But what is Armstrong going to do? He'd never have left his cozy perch at Google to oversee AOL's further decline. Let's assume that's not in the cards.

The best indicator of Armstrong's preferred strategy is not the one he pursued at Google. Based primarily in New York, Armstrong oversaw an agenda set by the geeks in Mountain View. To keep him on board, Google's top managers allowed Armstrong use his Google-IPO wealth to make several startup investments on the side, even when they posed a conflict of interest.

One company, Associated Content, run by Armstrong's college roommate Luke Beatty, lets amateur publishers post content on the Web and get paid a share of the advertising revenues. Another, Patch, is building local news sites with real journalists behind them, in competition with the New York Times.

It's not clear if Time Warner, which is stricter about this kind of thing, will let Armstrong stay involved with his side gigs. But what they spell out is a guy who's itching to be a media kingpin, not the boss of an army of programmers.

What that likely means: The future of AOL will rest in its blog-heavy MediaGlow division, while Armstrong works his Madison Avenue connections to rebuild AOL's slouching ad sales. If he makes it work, it will be a triumph over his old bosses at Google — the ones who believe in the alchemy of algorithms over the hard work of creating content that attracts an audience.

New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones economized.

Children's Hospital star Rob Corddry stabbed, then rinsed.

New York Times writer Jenny 8. Lee planned a party with, no surprise, fortune cookies. (Yes, but is she bringing her millionaire Googler boyfriend?)

Former AOL CEO Steve Case tried to feel relevant.

Author and sometimes entrepreneur Steven Berlin Johnson dined alone with his Kindle.

See something worth noting on Twitter? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

And not just regular sad, but emoticon sad. ":(", he wrote on Twitter:


Fitting that Case, whose company popularized instant messaging, is using IM lingo on Twitter, a service his former company could have built in-house with a trivial amount of effrot. (Imagine if those IM status updates, instead of being displayed on a buddy list, were broadcast to the Web.) It's an example of the "lost decade" Case refers to: Years of languorously chasing deals instead of pursuing innovation.

Yet his plaintive tweets obscure the issue: Case oversaw AOL for more than half of this "lost decade." After AOL bought Time Warner in 2001, he became chairman, and stayed on for a contentious two years. He remained on its board for another two and a half years. Why is he sad when he should be mad — at himself?

Facebook is unveiling a redesign (left) which replaces its friend-tracking News Feed feature with the Stream. The biggest difference: Corporate Facebook pages, for which users sign up to be "fans," can now place stories in the Stream much more frequently than they did with the News Feed.

Through a feature called Facebook Connect, Facebook already collects activities on other websites — like Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Digg headline votes, (and, yes, comments on Gawker Media sites like Gawker and Valleywag) — and posts them in the News Feed. Those will become even more prominent in the Stream.

The result: Facebook profiles will show less of what your real friends are doing, and more of what corporate pals like Starbucks and Ben & Jerry's are up to.

Facebook is not alone. Twitter's investors have been hinting that they're going to make money by helping companies have a presence on the site and get their messages out to users. It's not advertising like old-school banners or Google's text ads — it's something new, and more insidious.

Valley insiders call it "lifestreaming," but a more common term is "aggregation." ("Lifestreaming" is not to be confused with "lifecasting," which means broadcasting your life 24/7 on a mobile webcam.)

The trend was arguably pioneered by FriendFeed, a startup little-known outside Silicon Valley founded by some ex-Googlers. Like Facebook, FriendFeed pulls together updated of users' activities from across multiple websites and lets users comment on them. It has mostly been embraced by crazed early adopters who sign up for every new website that comes along. For people who have never heard of Plurk or Reddit or BrightKite, it's not as useful today — but the startup's ambitions have nevertheless sparked a competitive race for a market that barely exists today.

Google, the current king of online advertising, is racing to catch up to FriendFeed and Facebook. Last year, it poached Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz, who formerly oversaw Flickr and other social websites, to run a secret social-networking project. We hear that's coming to fruition, and may be based on Google's Blogger blogging site, which already has user profiles. (Orkut, a Google-owned social network, will probably fall by the wayside; it is losing ground to Facebook in the few countries, like Pakistan, where it has dominated.)

Yahoo, even without Horowitz, has been proceeding with a plan to build a social profile; it may launch next month, according to a Yahoo insider. And AOL spent $850 million on also-ran social network Bebo, which is now merging with its AOL Instant Messenger chat client, in an effort to catch up to the lifestreaming trend. Microsoft, too, is experimenting with a social update service.

The goal with all of these is the same: Gather up users' scattered online lives, and then daub the result with personalized, real-time ads. Instead of waiting for you to search for something, advertisers will target every step you take on the Internet.

The irony, as ever in Silicon Valley, is that everyone is racing to corner a market that may not exist. Twitter is arguably the purest lifestreaming startup around, and it's not making any money at all; all of its business schemes are currently just dreams. Facebook's expenses grow with every user it adds. And yet Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL seem convinced that lifestreaming is a business they need to be in. Could it be, in the end, that our lives are not interesting enough for a commercial break?

Ceefax, BBC's "teletext" service, got its start in the 1970s.

In 1981, KRON, a San Francisco TV station, reported on how the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner were both putting their papers online. Cost of the online version: $10, versus 20 cents for a print copy. Hey, that sounds good — for the newspapers, anyway!

Newspaper chain Knight-Ridder had a service called Viewtron which helped kids "learn how to think and be logical." Sort of like YouTube today, right? It cost $39.95 a month.

In the 1980s, there was Prodigy, an online service which had sports scores before the newspapers.

And then there was QuantumLink, a service which later became AOL and bought Time Warner in a $160 billion deal, before it became worth almost nothing.