If spinning is an intense political skill, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is doing her very best at trying to create a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

As Om Malik reports on GigaOm, Whitman–who is trying to nab the Republican gubernatorial nomination in California–told a radio interviewer recently that “actually I think Skype will prove to be a good acquisition for eBay.”

Well, good if you mean the $2.6 billion purchase of the Interent telephony that didn’t ever work as Whitman had effusively promised in 2005. Or the ugly lawsuits over it. Or the successful shakedown by its co-founders to get a big chunk back.

You get the idea.

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Google has a Web page up about today’s acquisition of AdMob for $750 million in stock, which includes this lovely image of the differences between what the Silicon Valley companies do in the mobile advertising space.

Here’s the quick translation: The Web search behemoth has been slower than molasses in the space, sticking with boring blue links of death, especially compared to the innovative and nimbler start-up, which is rocking the pretty ads.

So, we ate it.

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Google has acquired AdMob for $750 million, a huge price for an innovative start-up that hass pioneered online ads on mobile and now smart phones.

BoomTown visited AdMob last fall and posted about how it was likely to eventually be acquired by…Google!

The move is a major one for the search giant, which has been pushing hard into the mobile advertising space as it seeks to grow its already considerable Web business. AdMob is arguably the fastest out of the gate in the nascent arena.

Plus, here’s AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui in a video interview with me last November, as well as the official press release on the sale.

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Quincy Smith, the high-profile CEO of CBS Interactive, is planning on leaving his job at the media giant in January to start an advisory firm in Silicon Valley, according to several sources.

But, in an interesting twist, Smith will remain an adviser to CBS under a multiyear contract, sources added, making it his first client. Apparently, Smith will focus intently on authentication issues for the company.

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Yahoo has hired a new head of mergers and acquisitions–former General Electric M&A exec Andrew Siegel, who will now be VP of corporate development.

Yahoo CFO Tim Morse dropped the news with no details about that title in an interview with The Wall Street Journal about the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s third-quarter earnings.

One question apparently not answered was what exactly is the status of its current top M&A exec, Greg Mrva–who has had the title Siegel now has posted on his LinkedIn profile–as well as that of VP of mergers and acquisitions more recently.

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Uh-oh, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was expected to appear on the Internet giant’s third-quarter earnings call, but she apparently “came down with something,” according to CFO Tim Morse.

BoomTown is sending over chicken soup right now, but let’s hope she gets her vaccinations tout de suite!

Thus, no sassy quotes or cursing, but a very earnest Morse, who sounded like he was once a Boy Scout.

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According to numerous sources, Yahoo has been shopping around Zimbra, the open-source email company it bought in late 2007 for $350 million.

Zimbra is only one of the many assets of Yahoo that are now on the block, including its personals business, its HotJobs online classified unit and more to come.

The effort to unload Zimbra is yet another sign that the company is trying to slim down its diverse portfolio, even as it strives to redefine itself this week with a new, pricey marketing campaign that seeks to position Yahoo primarily as a consumer company.

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Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse–famous for his controversial “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” which correctly chided the Internet giant for becoming so lugubrious several years ago–is taking a job at AOL very similar to the one he left at Yahoo last year.

Garlinghouse, who will remain on the West Coast, will be named president of Internet and mobile communications at AOL, putting him in charge of the New York-based Time Warner online unit’s powerful email and instant-messaging properties, including ICQ and AIM.

He will also be, said AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, its “CEO of Silicon Valley for us.”

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave what he just had to know would be a much quoted comment to the Nikkei today, explicitly saying that the company had “begun seriously looking into acquisitions again.”

Music to the beleaguered mergers and acquisitions market, to be sure, especially after a recent uptick from other big companies pulling out their wallets again as the impact of the econalypse subsides.

According to sources, Google is working on at least a half-dozen acquisition deals, most of which are small start-ups in the online advertising and cloud-computing arenas.

That would be welcome news for many.

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The board of iLike planned a meeting earlier tonight to go over a buyout offer by MySpace, several sources close to the situation said. But it was suddenly canceled because of some thorny tax implications related to the talent-retention part of the deal to purchase the social music start-up.

This does not mean the pending acquisition is in jeopardy, sources said, and it could be on track to be signed as early as today, barring any more complications.

What’s also been unclear is the actual price the social networking giant is paying for iLike, which has been reported as about $20 million. In fact, only $13.5 million will be paid in cash, with $6 million slated for forward payments to retain key talent.

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It looks like the local market is heating up even more, with MSNBC.com announcing the acquisition of Chicago-based EveryBlock.

Sources said MSNBC.com–a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal–paid several million dollars for the “hyper-local” information site, which is up and running in 15 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Boston.

In June, Time Warner online unit AOL paid about $10 million to buy Patch Media, a platform that does deeply localized coverage of communities on a range of topics.

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MicroHoo. Check! FaceFeed. Check!

And Twoogle? Let’s check!

Yahoo and Microsoft have finally partnered. Microsoft is already a big investor in Facebook. And today, the huge social networking site just picked up online content-sharing site FriendFeed, which is chock-a-block full of ex-Google execs.

Now, one has to wonder if wouldn’t it be easier if Google finally ponied up and bought the most recent star of Web 2.0?

That would be, of course, Twitter.

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After Facebook announced today that it had acquired online content-sharing site FriendFeed, BoomTown had a chit-chat with Facebook’s Director of Product, Chris Cox, and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor.

Although neither budged on telling me the purchase price, which various Silicon Valley venture capitalists I spoke to estimated to be about $50 million in cash and stock, the pair came together after several months of casual conversation, probably sometime after Twitter spurned Facebook’s $500 million offer last year.

But, as in failed love affairs, moving on is the next best thing to do!

No word on who got to break the news to No. 1 FriendFeed Fanboy Robert Scoble.

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Facebook said today it is acquiring FriendFeed, the online content sharing site.

It is a logical fit for the social networking site, which has lagged behind microblogging kingpin, Twitter, in the real-time search and status game of perception in Silicon Valley. FriendFeed has also trailed well behind Twitter.

Terms were not disclosed, but it is likely be well under the $500 million Facebook once offered Twitter. In fact, sources estimate to me that the price was about $50 million in cash and stock.

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It did not start out too well for AOL CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong, with a poll on the screen showing most of the attendees in the ballroom at Fortune Brainstorm Tech voting that the Time Warner online unit was either out of juice or irrelevant.

Armstrong did not break any news in the interview with Fortune’s lively interviewer, David Kirkpatrick, relying more on projecting an I’m-in-charge-here attitude and saying confident things like “a challenge is also an opportunity.”

In general, Armstrong tried to be upbeat about the prospects for AOL, which has for too long been the Web’s sad sack of an Internet company.

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