Google Guy Armstrong Begins Sprucing Up AOL

Remember AOL? Sure, you do: That's where your grandmother receives those emails that she forwards to you with the note "I thought you'd like this, Sweetie!!!"

To judge from the spate of press about the company and its new C.E.O., Tim Armstrong, the company is desperate for you to know it's no longer your grandmother's AOL—even though, you know, it is.

Here are some details gleaned from Armstrong's press offensive. I thought you'd like this, Sweetie!!!

According to The Wall Street Journal, Armstrong is expected to focus the monster portal, email, and chat site on local content, a strategy The New York Times has been playing with via its Local blogs, and which The Huffington Post is doing on its New York and Chicago sites. Local is also the the main point of companies like Outside.in and Patch.com, which AOL bought in June. Not so coincidentally Armstrong was the founder of Patch, which reportedly went for about $5 million.

This is probably the fifth reinvention of AOL, which Time Warner is currently trying to spin off, finally ending a nine-year folie à deux that started promisingly during the first dot-com bubble but has become a burden for both parties. (No one's choosing sides, AOL-Time Warner: We'll always stay friends. But looking at your wedding photo still hurts.) Time Warner's stock once traded as high as $90.06 (in 2000) but goes for $26.60 at press time. Compare that with Google, which is going for, oh, $431.18 at the moment. (Yahoo!, on the other hand is at $16.95.) According to AP, AOL's ad sales fell 23 percent in the first quarter with $867 million.

The centerpiece of the new transformation is Armstrong himself, a 38-year-old former Google executive, who's been with the company since April. Armstrong's seen as a strong ad guy, someone who can focus AOL's business. He has about a year to do this, since Time Warner is prepping AOL for a spin-off by year's end.

According to reports, during his first 100 days the new CEO. has traversed the globe to meet with the company's employees, tinkered with the company's ad-sales network and in some cases scaling back ad placements to remove the clutter from its sites which include Moviefone.com, TMZ.com, and many others. Not everyone thinks he made the write choice leaving Google for AOL: In March, Wired.com ran a blog post under the not-so-subtle headline Has Google's Tim Armstrong Lost His Mind?

"Advertisers are going to be driving to Internet Road," Armstrong told Reuters. "[A]nd AOL is a major property on Internet Road." (Insert your own "road kill" jokes here.)

Rumors that Armstrong wanted AOL to buy Twitter were floated in April, but according to Bloomberg, AOL—which used to be known as America Online—is thinking of growing its European and Asian businesses. A key component in that effort was the purchas of Bebo.com, a European social networking site. As Armstrong told Silicon Alley Insider, he intends to help the site "focus on its core product and service and really try to improve in the social-networking space."

AOL Europe? Expect to receive a forward from grand-mère about that any day now.