One word: Shameful.

So, no surprise that Yahoo, which is trying mightily to burnish its image worldwide, quickly apologized for the presence of lap dancers onstage at its Open Hack Day in Taiwan last weekend.

Top Yahoo execs were at the hack event, although it’s not clear if they attended the lap-dancing part of the program, which seems to have a history of this sort of Pussycat-Dolls-meets-geeks tone.

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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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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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While getting ready for the spate of interviews at our seventh D: All Things Digital conference in just seven days, BoomTown has been doing a lot of research on the people taking the stage.

Some interviews will be quite serious (Eve Ensler, talking about the dire situation in the Congo) and some possibly funny (Mark Cuban, who simply defies definition).

But this picture that Twitter founder and CEO Evan Williams posted today on his Flickr page is easily the most unusual bit of research I have come across.

It is aptly titled, “This doesn’t seem awkward at all.”

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Yesterday, several Flickr engineers posted news of their layoffs from the Yahoo photo-sharing unit on Twitter, which caused GigaOm’s Om Malik to notice that Flickr architect Cal Henderson was also no longer on its About page.

According to several sources I spoke to, Henderson was actually not laid off at Yahoo, but is leaving to start a new company–in the social-gaming arena, I am told–with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

He and several other of the original core development team for Flickr transitioned out or have been transitioning out for quite some time, sources said.

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You could see this one coming a mile out: After telling users they could not upload new videos late last year, Yahoo is finally shutting down Jumpcut.

“This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!,” said Jumpcut in a note to users today.

That’s code for the stylings of new CEO Carol Bartz, who is hard at work axing many of Yahoo’s similarly lagging services.

The sassy video-editing service was bought by Yahoo in 2006 amid high hopes of the Internet giant becoming a big player in the hot online video market.

That honor, as it turned out, went to YouTube, which was more cats-on-skateboards-oriented than tools-oriented.

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BoomTown visited Twitter’s San Francisco HQ for a pie-filled tour yesterday, but I also got a chance to sit down and have a chat with two of its founders, CEO Evan Williams and Biz Stone, about all the latest doings at the wildly popular microblogging service.

I asked a lot before I did the video, but neither deigned to talk about the swirl of rumors about which giant Internet behemoth–Google or Microsoft–was going to get its wealthy mitts into the innards of Twitter (or not!).

Nonetheless, the pair actually took time to talk about what they think is behind the surge in growth and awareness of the simple-to-use service, as well as the state of innovation in Silicon Valley.

Here’s the video.

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Back in the heyday, Peter Currie was the money man to see in Silicon Valley.

As CFO of Netscape Communications, he led the famed browser start-up into history, as the first great Internet rocket ship, when it went public on Aug. 9, 1995.

Rising to insane levels, the stock was ground zero of the Internet gold rush, despite the fact that it had no profits to speak of. But it did have a 23-year-old co-founder and tech wunderkind in Marc Andreessen and a growth trajectory that was astounding.

If you think it sounds somewhat similar to Facebook today–where Currie will now help out as temporary financial adviser after the social-networking site parted ways with its CFO, Gideon Yu, yesterday–you are correct.

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At least he’s not going to Microsoft!

But nonetheless, sources said another major Yahoo tech exec and a longtime company veteran, Venkat Panchapakesan, EVP of the Audience Technology Group, is readying his departure from the company. This time, it’s to return to India, where he has long told colleagues he wanted to return.

Sources said Panchapakesan will not be leaving until the end of the summer, but “his departure is well along the road.”

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As part of its ongoing rejiggering of its social-networking offerings, AOL is formally rolling out its expected Lifestream platform today with a new “timeline” depicting a user’s online life in a streaming horizontal calendar called a Lifestory.

Lifestream will first be available on AOL’s Bebo and include updates from friends on Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Del.icio.us. Lifestream can also be used by brands, celebrities, bands and companies.

It’s all part of ongoing changes at the Time Warner online unit.

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Usually, BoomTown plays the stalker of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. But, with an interesting product to show off, this time he invited me and also Walt Mossberg to take an on-the-floor look-see at the company’s new “Connected TV” effort yesterday.

Wading into what has been a longtime dead-end for many tech companies–bringing the Internet to the television–Yahoo has struck a deal with South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung and other major television makers to put its software in televisions to link them to the Internet.

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Here’s a video interview I did with top Yahoo execs Tapan Bhat and Ash Patel yesterday, after Yahoo finally launched a lot of the new open and social elements that it has long said it was injecting into its most popular products. The initiatives Yahoo finally released into the wild have been long in the making, first discussed as just vaporware by Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Now, after the longest of gestation periods, they arrived yesterday, in an impressive rollout.

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This morning, AOL will launch an updated look for its Bebo social-networking property, with a new “social inbox” profile for its users. It essentially gives its users a one-stop destination, with aggregated social feeds from across the Web, multiple email accounts and media recommendations. But, according to sources, the online service is preparing a more radical series of announcements after the new year, well beyond its release today. Interestingly, the changes to its social-networking and communications properties yet to be announced have been among the things that have impressed Yahoo in its recent merger talks with Time Warner about buying AOL.

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This morning, FriendFeed, which is a kind of content delivery version of Twitter, went international, launching in six new languages–German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and simplified Chinese. Now live, the move is a natural extension for the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up–founded earlier this year by a small gang of ex-Googlers, who joined together to create a service for super-aggregating updates of all kinds for social-networking and news items in an ongoing feed. Here’s a video interview I did last week with Taylor and Buchheit about a range of topics, including–my favorite–monetization, or lack thereof, of a lot of terrific services like FriendFeed and Twitter.

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Yahoo–which has stuck to its guns by staying in the search business, even though many think it is a losing game and should be sold off to Microsoft–has lost a key engineer in that arena to–uh-oh–Microsoft.

Sean Suchter, the VP of Search Technology at Yahoo, was also deeply involved in Yahoo’s efforts to open up its search platform, initiatives the company has touted aggressively as a bright spot in its not-so-lustrous landscape.

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