Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) subsidiary, AOL LLC is announcing that they are acquiring Sphere tomorrow. Sphere is a service that is best known for finding related content and blog posts to specific articles and placing links to them in a widget form. You can find Sphere’s widgets on Pulse 2.0, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, GigaOM and TechCrunch.

The rumor is that Sphere will be selling for $25 million. Tony Conrad, the CEO of Sphere is serious and professional about his San Francisco, Calif.-based company. How do I know this? Because he personally e-mailed me to make sure that it was working perfectly on Pulse 2.0.

“Hi Amit – my apologies for the long wait to get the contextual widget code snippet. We got a bit slammed following Web 2.0 but have finally built a plug-in that works in WordPress Self Hosted blogs. Since you’re running WordPress (a great choice!) we wanted to put you in front of the queue to try out our new SphereIt Contextual Widget Plug-in for WordPress,” wrote Tony in the e-mail he sent me around January 2007.

Best customer service I’ve seen yet in the world of Web 2.0. Congratulations Tony, the Sphere team, and AOL!

Bill Wilson, an EVP of AOL Programming will be overseeing Sphere’s integration into AOL content properties. AOL content properities include Weblogs Inc., Finance, and Entertainment. Sphere will not be changing its brand. Sphere took in $3.5 million in funding across two rounds of funding.

I’m wondering if there’s a way to integrate Sphere with AOL Instant Messenger. I’m guessing that Sphere will be plugged into Weblogs Inc. blog network following the acquisition.

Disclaimer: Sphere is one of my most favorite startups of it’s time.

Information Sources:
[1] GigaOM:  Personal Note: Conrad Got Mailed by Om Malik
[2] TechCrunch:  AOL Buys Sphere’s Blog Content Engine by Michael Arrington
[3] Sphere blog: Our New Address @ AOL.COM by Tony Conrad

Pulse 2.0 has grown quite substantially in the last 3 months and has been a source for centralized technology information. I’m a regular reader of GigaOM and I began to notice the sphere widget added to their website. When you click on Sphere, an AJAX pop-up will appear listing other blogs that have recently written about similar topics. This is an amazing way to gather information, so I applied to have our blog posts powered by Sphere too.

Yesterday night, I received an e-mail from Sphere Founder and CEO, Tony Conrad providing us the installation code for the widget and with a letter thanking us for partnering with them. This is great news for Pulse 2.0 readers because now if you’re interested in the topics that we write about, you can easily find more information by clicking on the Sphere It button at the bottom of every blog post. After receiving this e-mail from Mr. Conrad, I gained so much more respect for Sphere since we are being directly contacted by the Founder and would highly recommend Sphere.com for all your blog searching needs.

When comparing Sphere.com to Google Blog Search, it appears that blogs have to be submitted for approval to be included in Sphere whereas Google Blog Search even picks up tons of spam blogs.

Check out a sample of information gathered by Sphere’s widget. In the last post I wrote about LinkedIn vs. Facebook. Check out the results that you get using the Sphere widget:

No spam there.  You will notice that the source of the related articles come from credible sources (ZDNet and VH1).  Even the TIME Magazine website is Sphere’d.  Pulse 2.0 has joined an elite force of web companies that have been officially Sphere’d and we’re definetely proud of that.  For more information on Sphere, refer to the Sphere team blog.

Richard Stengel, a Managing Editor of TIME.com, wrote about how the times are changing and how technology is evolving at TIME.com. The first change that TIME has made was that TIME magazine would now be released on Fridays instead of Mondays because subscribers were complaining that they would have to put off reading the magazine until the weekend. The most awaited feature of TIME is that the website is getting a new ‘face-lift’ starting Monday, January 8.

The new TIME website will still remain within the red borders. The main differences will be that the site will cater to some of the photographs that TIME employees have taken and there will be a new TIME blog called The Ag which will aggregate stories from daily newspapers and other blogs. There will also be a History section that will have today’s news reflect historical events that are in context.

A Law section will also be added and will be written by Reynolds Holding who was a former executive editor and is a lawyer of Legal Affairs. In the upcoming week, Holding will be looking into the correlation of right to privacy and freedom of speech in the context of e-mail spamming.

Another section that will be added is The Power of One, a report about how individuals can make a difference in their communities and the world. Jeffrey Sachs, a director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute will be a contributor to this new section. In the upcoming week, Sachs will be writing a piece about how to take steps in getting rid of malaria in Africa.

Judging by Alexa rankings, CNN.com is taking the lead of the preferred news source over TIME and these new steps that are being taken such as adding a Law section and blogs could be TIME’s way of climbing a few more steps as well. Currently, Sphere is powering TIME.com’s ‘related blogs’ entries: