Now that the deal is done, folks are crawling out of the woodwork with their thoughts. Granted, it's getting awfully lonely in the woodwork, so i figured i'd join them.
The Adsense ads you get will have graphics and (ultimately) flash, and nobody will care.
Well, that's not completely true. There will be a great cry from the vocal minority about how this is evil. They will, however, be ignored since they are not one of the several hundred thousand sites that don't care what goes into that adsense block so long as they get paid per click. The fact that 60% of those are spam sites is irrelevant. Oddly, this is strikingly similar to what happened to top end markets once folks discovered the "Long Tail", but that's also probably beside the point.
On a like note, it means that some folks will have to figure out another income source for the $2.60 a month they were getting from running all those Adsense ads.
AOL users will not be moved to gMail.
In a bit of good news, my bet is that the millions of AOL users will not be moved to Google Mail. Why? Google Mail can't handle the load and frankly doesn't want it. Nor does AOL want to lose the brand advertisement that goes with having @aol.com stuck on the rear-end of h0tslutz4u's email address. Ok, that's probably not the best example. Plus, AOL users would raise holy hell about having this new, complicated mail thingy to use when they just got the book on how to use the old one!
AOL and gTalk will merge
And nobody will care. AOL is a huge, staggeringly big, pile of users. Google Talk is not. The folks that generally would use Google talk use GAIM and Jabber already. The folks that generally use AIM don't. It'll be nice when everyone can talk to each other, but honestly, clients with more closely matched use bases merging would be a much bigger deal. Where things will REALLY get interesting is to see how Google deals with the authentification issues once they tie in with AIM's far more open network.
Plus Google Talk doesn't have that funny frog that burps "Hello There!" or lets me use those cute, free smilies i got from that website ad.
AOL/Google TV will get a lot more traffic and ultimately win.
It's already pretty heavily used. Go check out any linkdump site and you'll see tons of links to questionably acquired content all hosted and served from Google. Since Gvideo is ponying up the bandwidth, it's a no-brainer for folks to toss stuff on there and the vast majority of folks don't care about the rights to whatever video's they stole to begin with. Expect it to have some of the best porn and baby videos EVAR!!!
Sadly, the only real casualty out of this will be the innocense of countless folks.
