Essentially–although AOL is located in New York and not California–it’s going to be like tremors before the Big One at the online company today as about 100 employees are set to be laid off by management.

It is part of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s “Project Everest”–the code name for cost-cutting across the company. After this small cut, there could be a call for voluntary departures, followed by a much more drastic layoff.

The action comes in the same timeframe as the online site’s spinoff from Time Warner.

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Silicon Valley legend and now VC Marc Andreessen was making the interview rounds after the settlement between the litigation-addled co-founders of Skype and all the various people they were suing was announced this morning.

In an interview with BoomTown, when asked about the aggressive legal tactics of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis that resulted in them finally seizing a stake in the Internet telephony giant by suing him and many other Silicon Valley players, Andreessen said:

“We did not take it personally. It’s a clean sheet of paper.”

Well, it is actually a torn, stained and very worn out piece of paper, but bygones!

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In this digital era’s version of “Spy Vs. Spy,” Microsoft and Google find themselves in yet another sharp-elbowed battle to be the one to strike some sort of commercial search deal or product partnership with Twitter, many sources with knowledge of the situation said, as they also jockey for position to evaluate the potential of the much-hyped microblogging start-up.

After last week’s explosive rumor that Google was in “late-stage” talks to acquire Twitter, which BoomTown reported was wildly premature, I set out to try to sort out exactly what was going on.

As I found out, there was a lot–mostly much talking related to possible product and distribution partnerships, centered around Google or Microsoft, as both struggle to gauge the importance of Twitter.

It’s a familiar roundelay for the two most powerful companies on the Web.

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BoomTown is not going to go all servers and Solaris on you, as I am leaving the complicated details of the collapsed IBM bid for Sun Microsystems to Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski to sort out.

But I wonder if every failed tech merger with a squabblefest and a board in chaos will now be accused of blowing it, as most think Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang did in rejecting the $41 billion buyout offer from Microsoft.

And former Netscape CFO Peter Currie certainly has his hands full–he is on the Sun board and also just signed up to be the financial adviser to Facebook, after it abruptly parted ways with its former CFO.

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