AOL has appointed Stephane Panier as head of social network Bebo’s global operations. Panier was previously VP and COO of Bebo. Before joining Bebo in January 2009, Panier worked for Google for six years in both senior Finance and Operations positions. He first joined the Strategic Partnership team in Mountain View, where he provided financial, analytical, strategic and operational support to the fast-growing Adsense business. After two years, he moved to London to build and lead the Financial Planning team in EMEA before returning to Mountain View for a further two years to build the company’s Product and Engineering Finance team.

Ignited, an independent agency, has recently launched its innovative new website, www.IgnitedUSA.com. The site is completely centered around the user experience; rather than using a typical front-door or home page, it utilizes a “Rich Contextual Cloud.” Like a web text cloud, it pulls the most relevant content to the forefront, only rather than using words, it uses images and animates the rendering into a dynamic mosaic. Content is sorted and tagged by most recent so results are pulled uniquely each time.

Ripple6, a provider of white-label social media services to enterprise-class marketers, web publishers and e-tailers announced that Post Grape-Nuts, Benjamin Moore, Procter & Gamble and Unilever are among a growing number of top marketers to “crack the code” on social media by leveraging the Ripple6 Brand Communities social marketing technology. Ripple6 enables brand marketers such as Grape-Nuts and Unilever to connect with consumers and develop conversations and relationships with them in social networks. These Brand Communities can provide a conversation around the brand and its values to provide an entire community experience that is synchronized across the web.

Getfugu, developers of the next generation mobile search tool, will release, on September 9, 2009, its specialized and unique new mobile search tool that gives consumers the immediate ability to bypass typing in URL’s on their mobile phones by offering four unique services: See It, vision recognition; Say It, voice recognition; Find It, location recognition; Get It, Hot-Spotting.

Media Partners Asia and Screen Digest, media market intelligence firms, will collaborate on research and consulting services, targeting clients in international markets. MPA and Screen Digest will partner to offer a wide range of consulting services to clients in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Both parties will jointly market and produce research reports that serve common areas of interest to global clients and also promote each group’s services to respective clients, including Screen Digest’s online Intelligence services and MPA’s research publications.

Certainly not the $850 million it was bought for. Speculating grew early this year that AOL and its parent company Time Warner might be considering selling it. A proposal the company denied at the time. Estimates for the property were pegged at a dimishing $200 million.

But, according to Reuters, CEO Tim Armstrong says that AOL, which is in the process of being spun off from Time Warner, is reviewing assets it could sell or divest, but will likely keep its social networking site. Armstrong said that Bebo still has “great value” and that it will be moved to a Ventures unit of the online company so that work can be done to improve the site.

The move has raised speculation that AOL may want to sell Bebo, which has lagged in popularity behind other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

AOL bought Bebo in March for $850 million, which some on in the industry considered an extraordinarily high price for a vehicle that hasn’t exactly been churning out streams of advertising revenue. Time Warner (AOL’s parent company) even said as much, calling it the “riskiest” buy the company made in 2008.

Today, Bebo announced plans to pump up revenue by leveraging AOL’s IM users (roughly 124 million strong) to use Bebo’s Social Inbox – a content aggregator that provides users with access to email from Yahoo, Google, AOL and more; feeds from outside sites like Twitter and YouTube and a tool that recommends TV shows, online videos and music based on user data, the Journal reports.

Despite the company’s ambitious plans, skeptics aren’t convinced.

“Who has done a good job at monetizing any social-networking site yet?” Steve Kerho, vice president of analytics, media and marketing optimization at Organic, a digital-marketing firm owned by Omnicom Group, asked the Journal.

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The new social networking feature allows consumers to post status updates to multiple social networks at once, and provides profile activity information, including new friend requests, status updates and mail notifications from services such as AIM, Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other third-party sites.

“As the Web becomes more fragmented, consumers want choice and relevance in their Web experiences. AOL.com is the first traditional big portal to offer access to popular social networking sites all in one place,” said Bill Wilson, Executive Vice President, AOL Programming. “Now consumers can connect with their numerous networks and information sources all from AOL.com. We have already seen success by opening up AOL.com to other e-mail providers. We will continue to enhance the appeal of our portal with the changes we are making today by adding more relevant programming, customization opportunities, greater integration of third party content, improved design and access to social networks directly from AOL.com.”

Advertisers will benefit too. AOL’s digital ad arm, Platform A, will offer new capabilities, including customized wallpapers, increased rich media capabilities, much deeper and richer content integration opportunities and more. For example, a recent one-day advertisement for a new DVD provided a chance for the advertiser to own the AOL.com homepage wallpaper for the day to reach consumers in a highly customizable and measurable way.

It looks like AOL’s bid to boost its profile is working. In September, when AOL began allowing consumers access to Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail accounts, year-over-year page views to AOL.com grew 34%, unique visitors were up 12%, total visits were up 15% and total minutes were up 40%, according to the September 2008 comScore Media Metrix report.

The chief executive of MySpace China has reportedly quit, just one year after launching the site in China. Luo Chan’s departure is seen as a significant defeat for News Corp. and MySpace’s future in China. No word on a replacement.

Patrick Bonomo has joined MediaCom’s Beyond Interaction to lead its search marketing group as managing director. He hails from 24/7 Real Media, where he was in charge of North American search marketing.

Bebo founder Michael Birch has joined soon-to-launch video dictionary Wordia as an advisor. He is also an investor in the company.

The New York Times Co. is shuttering its metro distribution center and cutting 550 jobs. (The center handled paper delivery for the Times and about 200 other papers and magazines). The move to get out of the wholesale distribution business was motivated by dwindling print readership and high gas prices, the company said.

VeriFone Holdings has appointed Dykes to serve as senior vice president and CFO (he’ll assume the latter post following the filing of the company’s third fiscal quarter report). Dykes replaces Clinton Knowles, who served as interim CFO, after its former CFO, Barry Zwarenstein, was let go.

Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers has plucked up previous CBS Mobile chief Cyriac Roeding. He will be an entrepreneur-in-residence and may help Kleiner Perkins move its mobile-investment project along (it has partnered with Apple to launch the $100 million iFund specifically for mobile investments).

Bebo, a social media network, has snagged Nicole Vanderbilt from Google to mastermind its international expansion plans (focusing first on France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands). At Google, Vanderbilt was the head of industry marketing in Europe and India.

Harlan Stone has been named president of Major League Gaming’s sales arm, MLG Properties. Previously, Stone was a principal at Velocity Sports & Entertainment.

Kate Burns is joining Bebo as European vice president and managing director (the hire is close on the heels of Bebo’s president Joanna Shields’ promo to president of AOL’s People Networks). Burns hails from Dailymotion, which she joined just four months ago.

Adap.tv, creators of OneSource, a platform that helps publishers monetize online video content, has hired Dakota Sullivan as its vice president, marketing and product. She will run the company’s global marketing communications and product strategies. Previously, Sullivan was chief marketing officer at BlueLithium.

MIVA Direct, the homepage, toolbar and content arm of digital media company MIVA, has appointed Mark Ribaudo as vice president of direct marketing. He will be responsible for direct marketing and advertising across MIVA Direct’s portfolio of toolbars, homepages and destination sites. Ribaudo joins the company from Scholastic, where he was group director of Internet marketing.

Social Banners insert a user’s friend into an ad creative as a picture or first name to make the ad seem more relevant and engaging – the company hopes that integrating the social experience into an ad will engage more consumers.

“A successful advertising campaign within social networking sites should not only be engaging and creative, but authentic and social. Friends are interested in what their peers are doing, where they are going, what they are buying. They look to their network of peers,” says CEO of Socialmedia.com, Seth Goldstein. “Social media advertising should be an active process, where brands join the online conversation. Social Banners lead the way by leveraging the relationships within a peer’s network and using that picture or name within an ad to give legitimacy to a brand’s campaign. FriendRank, helps the process by understanding which friends are influential.”

According to eMarketer, social network ad spend will reach about $1.4 billion this year and $2.7 billion in 2011. The demographic that uses social media the most, ages 18 to 25, spends $172 billion a year, according to a recent study by Peanut Labs, and spends the majority of their time on social networking sites.

Socialmedia.com delivers ads within more than 5,000 apps running on Facebook, Bebo and MySpace.

Conan will report to Platform-A president Lynda Clarizio. The expansion will align AOL’s existing ad operations – including Advertising.com, ADTECH and buy.at — and will offer interactive advertisers and publishers a suite of marketing solutions. AOL’s publishing network in Europe includes sites in 13 countries.

“By bringing Platform-A to Europe, we can offer advertisers the best marketing tools and technologies available to help them effectively and efficiently deliver their messages to online audiences across Europe,” said Randy Falco, AOL Chairman and CEO, in a release. “This builds on AOL’s strong presence in Europe, and positions AOL for growth in three key areas – publishing, people networks, and our advertising network.”

Yesterday, Microsoft said the companies may work together, in lieu of the $47.5 billion takeover bid that died on May 3, much to the chagrin of Yahoo stockholders.

“In light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business,” the company said in a release. The development Microsoft is referring to is most likely activist shareholder Carl Icahn’s well-publicized plan to takeover the board on July 3 and force the company to restart talks with Microsoft.

The software giant left the door open a crack for a full merger, but industry watchers say it’s unlikely at this point.

“Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo or Microsoft or with other third parties,” the company said. “There of course can be no assurance that any transaction will result from these discussions.”

Microsoft and Yahoo do need each other if they want to compete against big, bad Google. According to comScore, Google has about 60% of the market share in the U.S., leaving Yahoo with about 21% and Microsoft with about 9%.

The timing of the news is significant, since Google and Yahoo just completed a trial search partnership themselves – and both companies hailed it as a success. There have also been recent rumblings about a permanent partnership, but obviously – nothing’s set in stone.

At this point, Yahoo’s should stop playing games and dance with the date that brung ’em, before they’re (again) unceremoniously dumped (for good).

But the Internet pioneer just can’t seem to stop making eyes at other companies: on Sunday, Yahoo issued a vague statement that basically said the company’s open to any proposals and is continuing to explore strategic partnerships to benefit shareholders.

In other Yahoo news, it looks like its ad deal with social networking site Bebo may be derailed by its new owner, AOL. Yahoo’s deal with Bebo (the third-largest social networking site in the U.S.) was seen as a major coup and a baby step toward competing with online goliath Google.

Yahoo was trading up about 1.01% to $27.9 as of 12:39 p.m. and Microsoft was trading down about 1.38% to $29.58.