Staci D. Kramer: Do you plan to continue things like the lifestreaming efforts, the direction the home page was headed in?
Tim Armstrong: When I came in here, the strategy was People Networks, Media Glow and Platform-A. I think after being here 100 days and listening internally and externally, that our strategy has changed a little bit on the People Networks front. We’re not combining instant messaging with social networking right now, which was actually happening when I got here. We’ve sort of unwound that because it wasn’t successful for consumers. We’re looking at communications as more of e-mail, IM and SMS. On the content front, Media Glow is a core aspect of what we’re doing but we’re thinking about technology in a different way with Media Glow. On the Platform-A side, I think there was a construct to put owned-and-operated inventory and mix it directly with network inventory and I think that we are unwinding that as well.

What does a unit have to do to be part of AOL Ventures? What is AOL Ventures?
We’re still deciding what goes in there. (We’ve since confirmed that Bebo, as expected, and Userplane will be part of AOL Ventures but others are still in flux.) AOL Ventures serves three purposes: to connect us with the innovation community across the globe. Ventures is not just a U.S.-based thing – it will be European, Israel, India, Asia. The second thing, assets we have inside the company that were acquired or started internally which had a purpose of some synergistic relationship with things inside the company and either the synergy wasn’t executed or the synergy has changed over time but they’re still great businesses. We’re trying to give them kind of a corral where they can live and grow and really act like a start-up without being constrained to the larger strategy the company has. Number three is, we’re looking for areas of business that we’d like to support the strategy areas or other areas we think are going to be important and do seed level or Round A investing in startups and universities to make sure we have a pipeline of potential acquisitions, innovation and partnerships. … We will take investments from outside sources in the current businesses we have if it will help improve and prosper those businesses.

How does Bebo fit into that?
Bebo is in an incredibly competitive space. Bebo has a stronghold in certain countries around the globe but I think the Bebo team in general could benefit from being in an environment where they can purely focus on Bebo and growing Bebo. There have been distractions for Bebo in the past, which have been closely tied to trying to integrate it and the integrations haven’t always worked well. We are in the process of letting Bebo focus on what Bebo is really good at.

Why didn’t that integration work well? Was it a bad idea to begin with?
I wasn’t here for the history of that. In every business, if there’s things you don’t try and don’t do, you don’t learn anything. I think the company has learned a lot from just figuring out the overall social networking and the communicatipons area has worked,

$850 million is a pretty expensive way to learn, though.
The $850 million was not spent to make IM more successful. It was spent to make social networking more successful at AOL. The $850 million acquisition was not an experiment. It was AOL getting into the social networking arena. … I don’t want to cast as an experiment.

Now that you’ve inherited it, do you see ever getting the money out of it?
I think in general from a strategy standpoint, Bebo offers a strong foothold in the social networking space. Right now, I don’t think there’s any current plans to try to monetize Bebo. We certainly are interested in bebo growing and having great products and services but I’m not interested in what the company acquired it for last year and you can sell it for today. We’re interested in what the consumer experience is with Bebo and how it fits into the larger landscape of the internet and with AOL’s properties.

Does Bebo get a new CEO or a new head?
No. We don’t have any announcements to make now.