AOL acquired Userplane today, a 12-person startup in Los Angeles powering text, voice, and video chat for MySpace, IGN, Honda, Date.com, and others. Userplane is the first startup featured at SF Tech Sessions and later acquired but I know they won’t be the last. Attendees of April’s tech session had a sneak peek at the MySpace instant messaging integration a week before it was formally announced at Digital Hollywood.
Userplane is a small, privately funded team and will continue to deploy white-label messaging solutions to sites around the Web. The network will now federate with AIM’s network, allowing custom accounts and identities on a particular service — car enthusiast by day, dating profile by night — while not requiring a separate open tool for each network.