Bronze medal social network (behind ever newsworthy Facebook, and MySpace) has announced that they have been taken over by AOL for a cash deal worth US$850 Million. The deal far surpasses the US$500 News Corp paid for MySpace in July 2005 – but the average price for each of their claimed 40 million users is slightly lower – US$21.25 vs. the US$25 Rupert Murdoch paid for each of MySpace’s 20 million users.

However it must be noted that their figure of 40 Million users is slightly contentious with Wikipedia listing some 20.3 million, and some of Bebo’s other claims have been questioned.

In a move bound to excite the open source community, today, AOL (operator of both the popular AIM, and ICQ Instant Messenger networks), seems to have begun the process of moving their systems from their proprietary protocols, to open source solutions.

ICQ, developed in 1996 by Mirabilis and sold two years later to AOL for US$407M was one of the early stars of the Social Web. Developed at a time when instant messaging was a new concept, it’s creators were forced to develop their own language to allow their new application to communicate with their server. In the years since, dozens of other protocols and clients have been developed by competing companies. Internet giants Yahoo, Microsoft, and even AOL before their purchase of ICQ, developed their own IM networks.

Because each of these networks relied on their own protocol, clients were incompatible with each other and there was no interoperability. To communicate with each other many users were forced to join, and use multiple networks simultaneously.

In 2005, when Google launched it’s own IM network, gTalk, it took a different approach. Rather than developing their own proprietary protocol, google chose to use an open protocol called XMPP (developed by the Jabber Open Source Community). This allowed google to focus on providing network support, integration with their own software (in-browser messaging in gmail for example), and the general user experience. Users can choose can choose from the many XMPP compatible IM clients, and share contacts between gTalk, and other XMPP compatible networks.

In 2006, Yahoo and MSN seemd to be experementing with the idea of combining their networks. The latest versions of each of their client programs allow users to add friends from the other network. The move by AIM to XMPP will put pressure on Yahoo and MSN to go all the way, and adopt an open protocol too.

For information on connecting to AOL’s XMPP test server, read on here.