When AOL was at its highest value, the company was worth about $240 billion. Back in 2000 AOL purchased Time Warner for $164 billion as part of a merger structure. The new company would be called AOL Time Warner. The deal was announced on January 10, 2000 and was filed on February 11, 2000. The FTC cleared the deal on December 14, 2000 and the merger was completed on January 11, 2001.

AOL shareholders owned 55% of the merged company and Time Warner shareholders owned 45%. America Online’s Internet Service Provider division drastically declined. AOL Time Warner had to report a loss of $99 billion in 2002 which was the largest loss ever reported by a company. Steve Case ended up resigning from the Time Warner Board of Directors on October 31, 2005. Ever since then the future of AOL was unknown. Time Warner wanted to spin off AOL from their own company for a very long time.

That issue has officially been resolved today. AOL will be officially spinning off from Time Warner on December 9, 2009. AOL stock will begin trading the next day. Investors that have 11 shares of Time Warner will receive 1 share of AOL on the day that the stock goes public. Time Warner has a market cap of $38 billion so that gives AOL a value of $3.2 billion.

When AOL goes public, one of the brands that they will be leaving with Time Warner is celebrity gossip blog TMZ.com. TMZ was created out of a partnership between AOL and Telepictures Productions. Telepictures is a subsidiary of Time Warner. AOL and Telepictures split the revenues of TMZ evenly. In 2008, TMZ made about $12.7 million for AOL so the company made $25.4 million total for the year. Up until this September of this year, TMZ.com earned $12.4 million total.

AOL will trade under the NYSE with the stock symbol “AOL.” AOL was trading in the NYSE before it merged with Time Warner back in the day too. The full press release is available after the jump:

President Barack Obama was doing a tour in China this week. On one of his stops, he was at a town hall in Shanghai. The town hall meeting was streamed online and one of the questions he was asked was about Twitter. Twitter was blocked in China since this past July.

A student asked the U.S. President “Do you know about the great firewall and should we be able to use Twitter?” The President replied: “I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.” That must be a disappointment to some of the President’s 2.6 million followers that actually believed Obama was sending out some tweets.

In actuality, it was staff members at The White House that were sending out the tweets. There is a difference in opinion regarding the President not sending out tweets himself. Some believe that it is wrong that Twitter verified his account and some believe it is a good thing that the U.S. President is not sending out tweets. I am going with the latter.

The U.S. President has a lot on his plate to deal with on his plate. Between the struggling economy, the war overseas, depletion of natural resources, financial bail-outs, automotive bail-outs, etc. — I think that should give the President enough to do every minute of his day.

Why do people tweet? For networking purposes. Why should people network? To gain respect and authority. Who has the most authority in the United States? The President. What more can the President gain by interacting with Twitter followers? I’d rather see him spending time ensuring a positive economic future than retweeting Ashton Kutcher.

Outright.com has raised $5 million from Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Shasta Ventures, and SoftTech VC. This is Outright’s second round of funding. The company is just like Mint.com but uses more of a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Outright raised $2 million in funding previously from seed investors. The seed investors include the companies that put in the second round except for Sequoia. Outright is intended for small businesses and individuals. This helps people put their taxes together easier too. The service is free and the company plans to introduce several add-on services in the future.

Sprint customers in Minnesota may be eligible for a refund if they had a cellphone contract extended without their knowledge. A legal settlement was made today that entitles those who got locked into a 2 year contract extension without their permission to an early termination fee refund. State Attorney General Lori Swanson said that the office will accept claims until March 15.

There are about 400,000 potential Sprint customers that are eligible for the settlement. Initially Swanson filed for $25,000 per incident but ended up settling for refunding the termination fees. Sprint Nextel accepted the settlement without admitting that they had done anything wrong.

The 2 year contract extensions were made without the consent of customers even when they made minor changes to their accounts such as changing the number of minutes.

In the opening weekend an analyst at Broadpoint AmTech Inc. estimated that about 100,000 Verizon Droid mobile phones were sold. This is an impressive number considering that there was not much time between the announcement and the launch date.

Now that a week of data has been collected, a mobile analytics firm called Flurry estimates that about 250,000 Droid mobile phones have been sold in the last week.

Flurry has access to every 2 out of 3 iPhone and Android handsets for collecting data. Based on the 250,000 unit sales estimation, the Droid can now be called “the fastest-selling Android phone to date.”

The iPhone 3G S sold about 1.6 million copies across 8 countries in the opening week. The Verizon Droid launched in one country.

Location awareness mobile application Foursquare is best known for broadcasting your whereabouts to friends. In mid-September the company raised about $1.5 million in funding, giving it a valuation of about $7-$14 million. With that round of funding the company was able to ramp up their developer services by designing various APIs.

As part of the API announcement, Foursquare launched an app gallery. Some of the applications available in the Foursquare App Gallery include Foursquare Android, Mob Zombies (location based Zombie game), and YipIt (New York City deal finder).

Foursquare was started by Dennis Crowley. Crowley previously sold a company to Google called Dodgeball. Dodgeball was also a location-based mobile application. Google ended up shutting down Dodgeball and used the technology to design the concept behind Google Latitude.

To learn more about Foursquare APIs, visit the Google Groups page.

Facebook and JP Morgan Chase are partnering on a charity initiative that will allow any of the 300 million Facebook users to donate across 500,000 local charities.

Facebook users vote for a charity of their choice and the number one choice will receive $1 million. The five runner ups will receive $100,000 and 100 finalists will receive $25,000 each. A special advisory board will be formed that includes actress Eva Longoria, former pro basketball player David Robinson, and Do Something founder Nancy Lublin.

When signing up for Twitter there is a list of recommended users to follow that appears. Those who were fortunate enough to be on that list of people instantly received hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. Jason Calacanis, co-founder of Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo believed that the suggested user list was so valuable that he offered $250,000 to be on it.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said that the company is currently exploring alternative ways to introduce prominent users to new members of the micro-blogging community. Some of the prominent users include politicians, news outlets, sports athletes, actors, and actresses.

“That list will be going away,” stated Stone when talking to reporters in Putrajaya, Malaysia. “In its stead will be something that is more programmatically chosen, something that actually delivers more relevant suggestions.”

It even got to the point that politicians started criticizing the list themselves too. Some Republicans said that Democrats are heavily favored in the suggested user lists than Republicans. Twitter employees say that they choose the suggested users list based on who posts messages often and engages with followers. Currently Twitter has about 54 million users.