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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When BoomTown went to visit serial entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur early last year at his San Francisco HQ, he was stoked about the prospects of his “video conversation” community start-up.

Fast-forward to today and the entire business plan of Seesmic has been upended, with the video part pretty much junked. Now Le Meur is focused almost entirely on his social media desktop client, as well as Web and mobile versions, which began as a dashboard for Twitter.

If at first you don’t succeed, dump and change again–the motto of Silicon Valley!

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What’s next for AOL?

Reviving the “You’ve Got Mail!” motto?

Or: “The Future. Now Available.”–set to music from “The Jetsons”?

What about: “So easy to use, no wonder it’s #1!”

Or maybe, it should just use a nice loooooooong busy signal as its calling card again?

Well, it could happen, now that new CEO Tim Armstrong has fallen prey to the siren call of the AOL brand name, after years of seeing the company wander in the anything-but-the-AOL wilderness.

Thus, he’s decided to try to welcome the prodigal brand back home, even as he prepares to spin it off in November from Time Warner.

Uh-oh.

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That was fast.

Longtime–well, five years, which is a dog’s age at the search giant–Google sales exec Dennis Woodside will become VP, Americas Operations, replacing outgoing exec Tim Armstrong, who was named chairman and CEO of Time Warner online unit AOL last week.

Woodside will start in the next few weeks, said Google in an internal communication about the appointment, as Armstrong transitions from Google to AOL.

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As BoomTown reported earlier today, AOL was abuzz with the rumors that former execs from the online service’s glory days, including still controversial former CEO Steve Case, might make an appearance at a huge staff pep rally called by its new CEO Tim Armstrong.

And so Case did show up in front of a cheering crowd this morning, along with former AOL vice chairman Ted Leonsis.

Considering that many at Time Warner, which owns AOL, still harbor resentment towards Case about the disastrous merger between it and AOL a half-decade ago, the move is groundbreaking for the troubled online service and perhaps a sign that it is finally time to move forward.

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First came the go-go hello email, and now new AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong will address all the troops tomorrow at 11 am EST and has chosen to do so from, of all places, AOL’s old center of power in Dulles, Virginia.

Many at AOL hope that Armstrong will quickly and transparently lay out plans for a spin-out of the Time Warner online unit from the media conglomerate, where it has languished for years.

And sources said Armstrong could further up the ante and help raise the layoff-weary morale by having some former AOL execs from its glory days as the top online player in person at the event.

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Yahoo’s not the only place BoomTown gets internal memos from!

Here’s two corporate missive about big changes in AOL’s international–such that it is–unit, as the head–Maneesh Dhir (pictured here)–moves on.

The longtime staffer at the Time Warner unit will “return to his entrepreneurial roots,” according to a memo from AOL CEO Randy Falco below.

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Many years ago in the midst of the Web 1.0 boom, when working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, BoomTown redubbed an annual dinner that book agent John Brockman threw at the TED conference.

It was jokingly called the “Millionaires’ Dinner,” but I renamed it the “Billionaires’ Dinner.”

That was due to the frothy fortunes that had been made at the time by the Internet pioneers, from Amazon to AOL to eBay. Get it?!?

Well, despite the economic meltdown, there were still a lot of billionaires in attendance at Brockman’s most recent dinner last Thursday in Long Beach. But he recounted to me that the proceedings were a lot more focused on the serious times we are in, as was the whole digerati-packed conference held last week.

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Happy days aren’t here again, it seems.

Still, I am not quite sure what to make of his big, happy smile on Seesmic founder Loïc Le Meur’s face, which went with a story in the New York Times about start-ups cutting costs.

In fact, the whole Seesmic crew is grinning awfully hard, putting a very game face on recent layoffs that cut the staff at the video blog service by more than a third.

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In a move to dramatically increase its traffic and give it more tools to offer publishers, Clearspring Technologies said it will acquire AddThis, the top bookmarking and content-sharing tool on the Web.

As with many social-networking start-ups, whether this disparate traffic can be easily translated into a revenue-generating business remains to be seen.

The McLean, Va.-based Clearspring–one of several widget networks seeking to connect publishers and advertisers with social tools by helping them embed small pieces of content across Web and monetize that content–would not disclose the price it paid for the Princeton, N.J.-based AddThis.

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Oh, there had to be much, much gnashing of teeth in the corporate offices at the Time Warner Center in New York yesterday with news of the sale of DailyCandy to Comcast for $125 million.

Why?

Maybe because that tasty payment is going right into the hands of Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group Ventures, which bought the fashion and shopping newsletter business for $3 million in 2003.

This is certainly different from the situation almost exactly six years ago when Pittman–nicknamed “Pitchman” for his smooth business stylings–was driven out of then-AOL Time Warner on the proverbial rail.

If you want a taste of those once-grim times for Pittman, here is an excerpt from my book, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future.”

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Yesterday, in what feels to BoomTown to be a deeply petty move, Time Warner said that it had blocked former AOL head Jon Miller from being considered as a possible Yahoo board member.

The reason is a noncompete Miller signed, part of a severance agreement he reached with the media giant after it unceremoniously tossed him out in late 2006.

A Time Warner spokesman said Miller was barred from working “for a variety of competitors, including Yahoo, until March of 2009.”

Like it matters.

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Off with the Yahoo CEO’s head!
OK, maybe not so much, at least today.
Indeed, according to many sources, Jerry Yang’s head still sits squarely on his neck.
And, moreover, his job as CEO has not been usurped by Yahoo (YHOO) Chairman Roy Bostock, who was allegedly–as one rumor went–authorized by Yahoo’s board, instead of Yang, to restart [...]

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Yesterday, the powerful portfolio manager at Yahoo’s largest investor, Gordon Crawford of Capital Research Global Investors, a division of Capital Research & Management Co., made some very public and very harsh remarks directed at Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang for blowing the Microsoft deal.

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OK, I like Twitter a lot, but what is up with all this tech news coverage of its outages?
With the Twitter service being glitchy all weekend, for example, the jump-to-the-next-big-thing champ Robert Scoble wrote another piece yesterday smacking his old amour and praising his new love: FriendFeed.
You know, the new pretty young thing in [...]

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