What's in it for them other than eBay-like headaches. And in all this, there's a developer question. There are a bunch of interesting apps to be built off Instant Messaging. Integrate chat with project management and web development. Another ad opportunity.
More community plays.
AOL with a developer community of specialized apps building off their service, competing with a similar developer community around Microsoft. I don't really know. The public statements so far have been about small things. The real question is who will be first to decisively open up their services to other developers. It could be that the only way to sort out all this stuff is for there to be publicly owned, non-profit servers that provide free information and connections, and scale up as the Internet grows.