Google and AOL are going steady and poor Microsoft will have to find another girlfriend. Links at tech.memeorandum. ( SearchEngineWatch has a good post too.)This from the NY Times article :

The executive said negotiations between the three companies reached a fevered pitch on Thursday night when teams from Google and Microsoft were in separate rooms of the Time Warner Center in Manhattan and executives from the media company walked back and forth between them.

And Google will take AOL to the prom. The deal is $1B for a 5% stake in AOL.

AOL and Microsoft are dinosaurs, MS the T-Rex going for jugulars and AOL the Brontosaurus, chewing greens and looking kind of dumb. I’m old enough to remember the AOL invasion of the WWW. It wasn’t pretty.

The predominant question is whether Google is evolving to the dinosaur stage. Nasdaq listings would indicate imminent D status.

But wait. Dinosaurs are extinct. Could Amazon (with Alexa and The Turk) be the bird that will fly over the millennium? Is Web 2.0 real or just another outfit for the emperor? Can we just move along here with some real Web services.