AOL acquires Thing Labs (Brizzly)

If one of AOL's goals was to announce multiple acquisitions in a single day in order to get exponentially more coverage than if they had announced them all days apart, then I'd say mission accomplished.

Wow! I was wondering what would happen to Brizzly after Twitter's new web interface. Brizzly has nice interface for in-stream media and so. I thought their key point was user interface. And I was thinking what would a startup (client) do, whose core selling point is better UI, in case when a platform itself comes up with a better UI.<p>I wonder how these acquisitions happen? Probably Brizzly knew they will die soon? So they wanted to sell it off? And they have some connections with AOL somehow, and get the word out that they are on sale? Any ideas?

AOL doesn't want to die alone.

In an interesting choice of words, the Thing Labs blog (blog.thinglabs.com) refers to this as a "merger".<p>"We are pleased to announce that as of today, Thing Labs is merging with AOL. This deal has been in the works for a little while, and we’ve been dying to tell you all, but today it’s official!"

Does this complement or replace AOL SocialThing? (now AOL Lifestream) What do you think is AOL's strategy?<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/14/confirmed-aol-acquires-lifestreaming-service-socialthing/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/14/confirmed-aol-acquires-life...</a>

With their record of taking cool companies down the drain, I worry about this AOL shopping spree.

I don't have much in the way of product, but AOL: you are more than welcome to acquire Robot Mode.