After landing a partnership with AOL/Userplane last year, JS-Kit has positioned itself for even wider distribution and potential for ongoing partnerships and branding. The deal between JS-Kit and AOL has officially come to fruition this week, with AOL/Userplane now distributing the JS-Kit 5 Star Ratings widget, greatly expanding JS-Kit’s reach to another several hundred thousand partner sites. To sweeten the deal, JS-Kit 5 Star Ratings widgets have also become the de facto standard with Userplane/AOL, HaloScan, and WorldNow.

The 5 Star Rating widget seems trivial but most publishers out there know that ratings can be powerful measures for rating and recommending content within a site or an entire network. Given JS-Kit’s own network approach, recommendations based on a number of publishers’ ratings helps other publishers in turn.

On the flip side, JS-Kit will also be distributing the Userplane MiniChat widget to all of its partner sites as well. Combined, the reach for these two widget offerings extends to nearly 1 million registered publishers, but what does that mean?
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After shutting down its own video upload service and recommending Motionbox as an alternative, AOL has managed to find a way to actually partner with the company it suggested for video uploading and sharing. Motionbox has a new partnership with AOL’s recently acquired social network Bebo, to provide video storage, publishing and sharing services to its users.

If you’re a Bebo user, you may have noticed the transition messages via email and on Bebo’s website for the past month or so. Those that choose to use the new Motionbox-powered video services will be able to access basic membership features, enabling them to use online editing tools, secure storage and sharing options.
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PaidContent is reporting that the AOL acquisition of Bebo is now complete. The news also comes with reports that Yahoo! will end up losing their ad deal as AOL’s Platform A becomes integrated into a new combined entity. The combined entity includes AIM and ICQ, Bebo and other community platforms which will be called the “People Networks.”

Ultimately what just took place is that AOL’s people channel fell in popularity and they simply acquired a growing company to rebuild their community division. As Adam Ostrow points out, this could be five years too late. Why didn’t AOL turn AIM into a social network years ago? I’ve been writing about this since I started blogging over a year and a half ago. Instant messaging is still one of my primary social networks.

It’s as though AOL is spending a ton of money to try and rebuild what once used to be a booming community. This is a classic problem facing the large companies which have large attention shifts away from their properties to external sites. As large attention shifts take place, online media entities need to try to monetize while continuing to expand their attention portfolio.

We love to hate AOL though. AOL does have one of the most diversified set of assets which represent some of the most visited websites. While I’m somewhat skeptical of how a combined entity will end up working out, it makes some sense. Combine chat, social networking and user profiles, tracking of activities throughout the network and you end up with something eerily similar to Facebook. It will be interesting to see if AOL can make these distinct entities somehow work together.

One week ago AOL announced that they were acquiring Bebo for a whopping $850 million. The blogosphere was surprised by the acquisition and now one week later talk of AOL making a horrible decision is returning. Is this surprising? Not really. While Bebo was the second social platform to market, growth has become relatively stagnant.

According to Henry Blodget, executives at AOL have had some internal conflict over the acquisition. The primary issues highlighted were the inability for AOL to monetize social-network inventory, Bebo’s flattening growth and the belief that the Bebo founders will hit the road. If I was the Bebo founders I definitely would hit the road! We’ve heard stories of how expensive it was for Fox Interactive to keep on the MySpace founders on board.

I have to agree with Henry Blodget when he quotes Glengarry Glen Ross, “first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado, second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you’re fired.” Many believe that the social networking space is a two horse race and that’s how it will remain. While maintaining a site with millions of active users can be a steady business, you won’t see the type of growth that the leaders are experiencing.

This was a last ditch attempt at joining the social networking game and as I said last week, join the social graph race. What is confusing to me though is why doesn’t AOL simply focus on leveraging their instant messaging service? Building out instant message services that are comparable of competing services such as Trillian or even Facebook’s new IM service would help them to rebuild the failing AOL community.

Then again, I’ve been wondering about why AOL hasn’t reinvented their instant messaging service for years. Do you think AOL’s acquisition made any sense? Do you think leveraging their instant messaging service could prove valuable?