Facebook’s announcement that they are opening up API access to user’s status updates (and more) is big news. The status update has become the ultimate social gesture. You could see this coming if you were watching carefully. All last year, Facebook, who is the leader in social networking and will continue to be as far as I can tell, focused on morphing the user experience, first to the news feed and ultimately to the status update as the primary user experience.

But Facebook did not invent the status update. I honestly don’t know where the status update started but for me it was AIM where I first was asked to leave a short note telling people what I was doing. I’ve heard Jack Dorsey, the inventor of Twitter, talk many times about his inspirations for Twitter and one of them was the status message in AIM.

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Social networks are front and center in the latest redesign of AOL’s AOL.com homepage, which the company announced Thursday and says it will start to gradually roll out to users over the next few weeks (unless they choose to opt in earlier).

A widget (or module, or gadget, or whatever you want to call it) on the new AOL.com features a tabbed interface with updates from five different social-networking and messaging services: AOL’s own AIM and Bebo, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook. Called “My Networks,” the tabs invite members to log into their social profiles and see a limited amount of information–feed and in-box updates from Facebook and MySpace, new Twitter messages, AIM status messages, etc.–as well as links to access the full versions of the apps.

The Facebook credentials, for example, come from the social network’s new Facebook Connect service, an extension of its developer API.

These are just the launch partners, AOL executive James Clark told CNET News last week, and more social-networking and messaging services will be added to the lineup over time. “(It’s) part of a consistent evolution of opening up,” Clark explained, pointing to AOL’s addition last month of outside email service alerts to AOL.com.

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In the world of instant messaging, few services come close to the popularity of AIM, and no one can beat AIM in terms of longevity. The communication tool was launched as a feature of the first version of the AOL dialup service in 1989, according to AOL technology fellow Edwin Aoki.

AIM has come a long way since then. It now incorporates voice and video, and has more than 100 million users worldwide. Aside from the sheer size of its user base, continued innovation and partnerships in the enterprise IM space have allowed it to maintain its dominant position.

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One thing’s for certain: The collapse of the Yahoo-Microsoft deal could be the best thing to happen to Time Warner’s Jeff Bewkes for a good long time.

Yahoo reportedly has a deal teed up to buy AOL for about $10 billion. We suspect that the newly dumped Microsoft may have something to say about that.

AOL wouldn’t give Microsoft what Yahoo would have, but it would help the company strengthen its Web-based communication business (AIM, AOL Mail, etc.). MapQuest could be a nice fit with Microsoft’s mapping products.

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AOL, the online division of Time Warner, is buying fast-growing social network Bebo for close to $850 million in cash, the company announced today. AOL is talking some gobbledygook about marrying AIM, ICQ with a real social network. Whatever!

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