Yesterday, BoomTown wrote about AOL’s efforts–including hiring investment bankers–to sell its ICQ instant-messaging unit.

But that’s probably not going to be the end of the shedding of assets at the online site.

In fact, according to sources inside and outside AOL, one of the next candidates for sale could be its MapQuest online map service.

Purchasers of the service that provides mapping and directions, sources said, are likely to be other mapping giants, especially Microsoft (MSFT).

But it is not clear if the software giant or anyone would fork over a huge sum of money for MapQuest.

That would include the $1.1 billion in stock that AOL paid for MapQuest in 1999.

AOL is set to spin itself off in less than a month from corporate owner Time Warner (TWX), and sources said selling off peripheral properties is part of becoming a smaller, more focused company.

MapQuest, like AOL’s Bebo social networking site, fits this description.

While it does have widespread distribution across the Web, reaching over 40 million users monthly, MapQuest lags well behind aggressive efforts being pushed by both Microsoft and Google (GOOG).

It certainly is good to see Microsoft working the innovation thing, especially in the consumer space with its Bing search service.

The ultimate goal is to gain market share for Bing, from striking deals with hotter companies like Twitter and Facebook to doing a massive advertising and marketing campaign to making constant feature upgrades.

This is one of those weeks for Bing, which started off yesterday by renaming its video properties on MSN, now integrated with search, to Bing Videos. Microsoft also rejiggered its Bing Maps.

And today, the company is rolling out more features, including integration related to diet and nutrition with fancy search service Wolfram|Alpha, an “enhanced hover preview” and full-page weather and events results to add to its niche search offerings.

But whether all this will spell significant changes in market share compared to dominant rival Google (GOOG) is still an open question, with Microsoft (MSFT) eking out solid gains since Bing launched.

Today, Hitwise figures have Bing up seven percent to 9.57 percent in October, at the expense of both Google and Yahoo (YHOO).

Money is also coming in slightly better. A recent report by IDC noted that Bing’s search revenue has gained 6.1 percent to 6.8 percent from the second-to-last quarter.

But spending on advertising, as well as these new features, is also costly.

Still, Microsoft is pressing on.

The Wolfram feature, for example, adds a nutrition quick tab when searching on food items, as well as a body-mass index tool.

Here is a video on it from Bing, which might require installation of Microsoft’s Silverlight video technology (you might also want to launch full screen to see it better):

Bing will also improve the ability of users to get quick info by hovering over a link. Frankly, this annoys me more than bad clicks, but most people will probably like seeing snapshots of the actual Web sites, a search-within-this-site box and deep links.

Perhaps the most interesting iteration of this feature will be Facebook page previews. Click on arrow below:

The weather stuff is just more, more, more bells and whistles, integrating news, events, xRank results, Twitter feeds, images, Best Match results and content from sites you trust onto one page with a prettier interface. Check it out:

There will be more to come, of course, which should–at the very least–have competitors competing better.

And in this departure of Kevin Johnson, president of Platforms and Services Division, from Microsoft–a big-deal job, let it be said–to become CEO of the network infrastructure company, Juniper Networks, is what my grandmother liked to call a beaut.

Johnson, I might remind you, was the point person on the software giant’s failed takeover bid to acquire Yahoo (YHOO), which rejected him and the rest of the Microsoft (MSFT) team over and over again in a very public fashion.

But who will Johnson’s most immediate Internet neighbor be when he takes up residence, presumably, at Juniper’s Sunnyvale, California, headquarters at 1194 North Mathilda Ave.?

Why that would be Jerry Yang at Yahoo HQ, 701 First Avenue, a mere half-mile away (see the Google map–oops!–below; click on it to make it larger)!

In fact, despite all the wrangling, Johnson and Yang still actually have a great deal of regard for each other, so one hopes the pair can all look forward to long CEO walks and lovely lattes together in the future.

(Kevin, Jerry will be right over with the welcome wagon full of purple and yellow Yahoo swag.)