In a week, the entire advertising sales staff of MySpace will gather at a swanky new seaside resort about 20 miles south of Los Angeles to get a first glimpse of the fresh direction the company is preparing to take under its new management.

The beleaguered social networking site has been in the midst of an effort to reinvigorate its image, spur innovation in its product and–most of all–pull itself out of a too-long slump, even as longtime rival Facebook has seen explosive growth.

On the possible agenda: A new strategy aimed at music and entertainment; a new look; and, perhaps, a new boss for the ad sales team.

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On BoomTown’s trip to London earlier this week, I stopped by the U.K. and Ireland offices of Facebook for a look-see.

Located just off once-swinging Carnaby Street, it’s a very small operation, mostly dedicated to advertising sales. But I did run into some engineers too, at what is Facebook’s most important international outpost.

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Oh, it’s the middle of August, so why not report this little tidbit: Former Google exec Sukhinder Singh Cassidy has been appointed to the board of the J. Crew Group, the well-known New York-based specialty retailer.

She is now a CEO-in-Residence at Accel Partners in Silicon Valley, after leaving her longtime job at Google, where she was president of its Asia-Pacific and Latin American operations.

Cassidy was also one of Google’s more visible execs and highest-ranking women leaders, so BoomTown is more interested in where the the 39-year-old will land next as a top exec at a Web operation.

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It’s certainly acquisition fever in Silicon Valley today. After it was announced that Facebook had bought FriendFeed, now comes the news that VMware has purchased SpringSource, a privately held enterprise and Web application development and management cloud computing start-up.

The price? That would be $420 million in cash and stock.

With the purchase of Spring Source, Palo Alto-based VMware–which is a top player in the virtualization space–is adding to its cloud-computing application-management strength and also its ties to the open-source community.

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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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In a quiet fund-raising effort, Ning has raised $15 million more, a round that is valuing the social networking start-up at an eye-popping $750 million.

The money for this fifth Series E round comes from Silicon Valley’s Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ning, founded by well-known entrepreneur and Ning Chairman Marc Andreessen and CEO Gina Bianchini, confirmed the funding when contacted by BoomTown. It was not actively searching for funding.

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Facebook picked a new CFO quietly, after its cloddish public parting with longtime top financial exec Gideon Yu earlier this year.

The fast-growing social-networking site said in late March it was looking for a CFO with “public company experience,” and it seems to have gotten one in former Genentech CFO David Ebersman.

And, indeed, with the addition of Ebersman, Facebook inches ever closer to an IPO.

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How much is BoomTown and everyone else in Silicon Valley trying to nab a copy of Ben Mezrich’s likely-to-be-entirely-made-up-but-who-cares tale of dirty doings at Facebook?

Muchety-much! But, so far I have come up peanuts in grabbing an early copy of the work of “fact”-ion–titled “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal”–which is set to come out July 14, along with a movie later.

Facebook is not pleased, of course, and will likely be challenging Mezrich’s work as specious dreck, but here’s my own list of 10 completely made-up, utterly fabricated, just-call-me-Jayson-Blair facts that should be in the book.

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Exactly how is the introduction of vanity URLs on Facebook going to go?

At 9:01 p.m. PDT on Friday, the giant Silicon Valley-based social-networking site will allow its 200 million members to log in and claim a friendlier username for part of their URLs instead of the long string of gibberish that is now there.

But, because it is about people’s names and because it is certain to be chaotic in its execution, I think we can pretty much slap the moniker “URLgate” on this one and just call it a night.

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Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta has finally been officially named as CEO of MySpace, as BoomTown reported yesterday and News Corp. announced this morning.

He will replace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, who stepped down from the job earlier this week. DeWolfe will remain a strategic adviser at MySpace.

Here’s the full press release.

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Internet navigation browser plug-in maker Cooliris, which lets users “see” the Web in a more visual manner, has gotten $15.5 million in additional funding from its investors.

The new round includes Kleiner Perkins, DAG Ventures, the Westly Group and T-Mobile’s T-Ventures, bringing its total funding to $18.5 million.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up is also releasing out of beta the latest upgrade to its 3-D “Wall” software, which displays more online content and information from around the Web, including from social-networking services like Facebook, shopping sites and from a user’s own hard drive.

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Facebook CFO Gideon Yu is leaving Facebook, as the company announced internally today that it was replacing him and searching for a new CFO on the path to an eventual IPO.

The Wall Street Journal also reported the news, noting that the huge social-networking start-up was looking for a CFO with “public company experience.”

But several sources within the company said the departure was more due to an increasingly strained relationship between Yu and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg over strategic disagreements about a wide range of issues, from increasing ad revenue to fund-raising discussions with investors.

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Yesterday, Facebook introduced another new look at an open house at its Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

Much of the analysis centered around how Facebook was trying desperately to mimic Twitter, especially since Zuckerberg said in a blog post that it was (without naming Twitter, which it had tried to buy).

But Facebook was actually borrowing from all over–from AOL’s Bebo too–to leverage whatever is popular out there. After all, with the big numbers it’s putting up on the board in terms of audience, it’s hard to stay as innovative, as much as be a fast follower to those who are nimbler or need to be bold.

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Last night, Tapulous launched the second version of its hugely popular iPhone game app, Tap Tap Revenge.

With Tap Tap Revenge 2, the Silicon Valley start-up is hoping to keep up the momentum of its first success on the Apple service.

I visited the Tapulous offices in a former storefront in downtown Palo Alto, Calif., to interview co-founders Andrew Lacy and Bart Decrem to talk about the iPhone ecosystem and where it is all going.

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Under cover of darkness last night, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on the social-networking site’s blog that it would “return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

Oh, this is just too good to resist. Therefore, BoomTown shall not tarry in our ongoing job of busting the chops of the young Facebook leader, whose minions have actually–and I am not joking here–given him the nickname: The Wizard.

Well, the Wizard obviously had to pull back the curtain last night and show some serious mea culpa to the people, before they got out the pitchforks.

Here’s a translation of Zuckerberg’s message.

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