What’s next for AOL?

Reviving the “You’ve Got Mail!” motto?

Or: “The Future. Now Available.”–set to music from “The Jetsons”?

What about: “So easy to use, no wonder it’s #1!”

Or maybe, it should just use a nice loooooooong busy signal as its calling card again?

Well, it could happen, now that new CEO Tim Armstrong has fallen prey to the siren call of the AOL brand name, after years of seeing the company wander in the anything-but-the-AOL wilderness.

Thus, he’s decided to try to welcome the prodigal brand back home, even as he prepares to spin it off in November from Time Warner.

Uh-oh.

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In Web years, BoomTown is now officially 143 years old.

Why? Well, I was the one who got to write the big Page One piece in The Wall Street Journal after GeoCities was sold to Yahoo in January of 1999 for $5 billion in stock.

GeoCities was, in its way, the Facebook of its time. But, instead of “friends,” its users were “homesteaders.”

As Cher so eloquently sings: Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end.

Except they did. Yahoo announced yesterday that it was closing the GeoCities unit down, part of new CEO Carol Bartz’s war against useless assets at the troubled company.

But let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?

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We all liked Mike. In fact, we all loved the pugnacious, energetic and restlessly entrepreneurial Silicon Valley exec.

Sadly for those who knew him, Mike Homer died today at his home surrounded by family and friends, after a long battle with a severe illness. He was 50.

Homer is survived by his wife and three young children: James, Jack and Lucy.

His funeral is at Saint Raymond’s Catholic Church in Menlo Park on Thursday.

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Oh, there had to be much, much gnashing of teeth in the corporate offices at the Time Warner Center in New York yesterday with news of the sale of DailyCandy to Comcast for $125 million.

Why?

Maybe because that tasty payment is going right into the hands of Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group Ventures, which bought the fashion and shopping newsletter business for $3 million in 2003.

This is certainly different from the situation almost exactly six years ago when Pittman–nicknamed “Pitchman” for his smooth business stylings–was driven out of then-AOL Time Warner on the proverbial rail.

If you want a taste of those once-grim times for Pittman, here is an excerpt from my book, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future.”

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