That was fast.

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

Woodside, 40, will start in the next few weeks, said Google (GOOG) in an internal communication about the appointment, as Armstrong transitions from Google to AOL. It is the key advertising sales job at Google.

Armstrong has already been hard at work at AOL, in fact, leading an employee rally today at its former HQ in Dulles, Viriginia, which included former AOL execs Steve Case and Ted Leonsis.

(And he will hold a similar meeting at AOL’s New York office tomorrow, BoomTown has been told. But let’s hope he does not roll out, say, former Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin, which would be taking this old-home-week stuff too far!)

While Woodside is a well-known exec within Google, his name was not as prominent in the speculation about which internal Googler would be named by CEO Eric Schmidt to replace the well-known Armstrong.

Wrote MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka last week, for example, when the Armstrong departure was announced:

“According to a (very informal) flash poll of Googlers, ex-Googlers and Google competitors I conducted last night, the answer should be obvious: David Rosenblatt, the former Doubleclick CEO, who now runs Google’s display business.”

Woodside will also have a slightly lesser title than Armstrong, who was a corporate SVP, was president of the America Operations and was also on Google’s powerful operating committee.

But that’s part of the changes, mentioned in a long statement by even bigger sales boss Omid Kordestani, SVP, Global Sales & Business Development, to whom Woodside will report (the key graph is the last one, although the golf dig is funny):

In the five and a half years that Dennis has been at Google (that’s over half our company’s lifetime) he’s brought incredible integrity and entrepreneurialism to everything he’s done. I remember Dennis setting off from Mountain View in 2005, a year and a half after he joined, to start our direct sales operations in Eastern Europe, which he quickly transformed into a substantial part of our business. He also set up our Inside Sales Operations in Dublin – again building it from scratch. In September 2006, he became our Vice President for the UK, Ireland and Benelux where he’s helped to create a first class team as well as establish very positive relationships with our big partners on both the advertiser and agency side, including 02, Marks & Spencer, Amazon and Omnicom.

Ever since I met Dennis in 2003, I have been impressed by his combination of entrepreneurialism and operational excellence. He’s never afraid to try new things and always ready to roll up his sleeves and pitch in–whether it means moving his desk to sit with the UK DSO team to see the operations first hand, or being the customers’ advocate internally to help product and engineering better understand market trends. Outside work he loves to do triathlons–though I would only recommend training with him if you don’t mind being out-run (if you are looking to beat him, try golf).

While we are all sorry to see Tim move on, change always brings new opportunities. We believe it’s now time not just to roll-out globally the best practices from the different regional sales teams–the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific–but also to tailor our business strategies more closely to the different situations we face in different countries (more mature versus less mature markets).

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 (pictured here), 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 (TWX), 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.

In related news, Sasquatch will appear on the Time Warner-owned CNN’s “Larry King Live” show tonight.

The appearance by Case took place on AOL’s former HQ in Dulles, Virginia, on the tented lawn of the sprawling campus for the company, which only a decade ago was the dominant online powerhouse.

The event was broadcast to the AOL empire worldwide, reaching thousands of employees, and included all of AOL’s top execs and several from Time Warner, such as General Counsel Paul Cappuccio and CFO John Martin.

Leonsis, who gave a “lucky” green tie to Armstrong, engendered cheers as he spoke of the importance of change.

But it was Case’s entry that was a shock to the standing-room only audience of 1,000. He told the crowd that he would be a “cheerleader on the sidelines” for AOL.

Both Case and Leonsis talked about putting the past behind the service–and there is a lot of past to put behind, I might add, between AOL and the media giant–and were very supportive of Armstrong.

Armstrong, who was a key advertising exec at Google (GOOG), made the point of joking that Case and Leonsis were “on the payroll” at AOL again.

Armstrong focused mostly on AOL products, rather than its troubled history, employee morale and the importance of reviving the famous but tarnished brand.

And to get AOLers jazzed again about reviving the service, Armstrong asked rhetorically: “Are you committed to putting America back online?”

As soon as he got his new job last week, new AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong sent out a rather hopeful email to the troops–his first communication as the latest leader of the ragtag online service.

“I’m really looking forward to seeing you and would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions,” wrote the former Google (GOOG) exec Friday (who alarmingly kind of resembles this Elvis image), “on how to make AOL and its sister properties the most powerful brands on the Internet.”

Well, one can hope!

To goose that dream, although he still does not officially start in the job until April 7, Armstrong is also addressing 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.

AOL staffers I spoke to also hope most of all that Armstrong will quickly and transparently lay out plans for a spin-out of the Time Warner (TWX) online unit from the media conglomerate, where it has languished for years.

“Armstrong would not have taken the job if the plans for a spin out of AOL were not in place and it’s in everyone’s interests to signal that it’s a go right away,” said one source close to the situation. “The only catch is the poor economy, but even that should not prevent Time Warner from doing what’s right to finally fix AOL.”

And sources said Armstrong could further up the ante tomorrow 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.

Several sources said one exec most likely to make an appearance is Ted Leonsis (pictured here), one of AOL’s most colorful top early execs and a longtime inspirational figure within its ranks.

Unlike most AOL execs from those days, many of whom were eventually run out on a rail, Leonsis also stayed on through its disastrous merger with Time Warner and beyond.

But, like all of the Dulles complex–which was once the bustling worldwide HQ for AOL–Leonsis finally left the company, after a falling out with the management regime that Armstrong just hipchecked out of power. He is now AOL’s vice chairman emeritus.

Both CEO Randy Falco and President Ron Grant moved AOL’s locus largely to New York, and minimized the staff and influence at Dulles, where most of AOL’s products have been made since its origins in the early 1990s.

“It’s a smart move to go to [the Dulles staff] directly first…the last regime pretty much shut them out…and that created bitterness, when we need to be unified,” wrote one AOL insider to me in an email.

(Sidenote: As the AOL beat reporter at the Washington Post back then, I actually went with then-PR head Jean Case to look over what became the Dulles facility, to see if it would be a good place to expand to; previously, AOL was located in nearby Vienna, behind a car dealership.)

A Leonsis visit at AOL will be like old home week, although some are hoping too that former AOL CEO Steve Case could also make an appearance. He and Leonsis still make online investments together.

But that might still be deeply controversial within Time Warner, where Case and also former Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin are widely blamed for situation that the company found itself in when the Web 1.0 bubble burst and AOL’s once vaunted valuation collapsed.

Although Case and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes have since moved on, bygones have not been bygones within Time Warner.

And, while it is often denied by top execs, AOL has suffered because of ill-hidden grudges, which have partly prevented it from being revived, even as other Internet giants have been born in the interim.

Ironically, many of the current crop of shooting stars owe a lot to the pioneering and innovative AOL products, including: its AIM and ICQ instant messaging services, which echo an early version of Twitter; the “Buddy List,” which was all about friending; and its deep social networking roots, with chat rooms and profiles that were the Facebook of its day.

The question for Armstrong is: Can AOL go home again?

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

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

Dhir has been based in India since his appointment several years ago. He came to AOL from its acquisition of Netscape in 1999.

And, in another memo from AOL President Ron Grant (also below), it looks like MediaGlow President Bill Wilson will get most of the goodies from Dhir, with all of international publishing reporting to him now, such as AOL Europe’s Dana Dunne.

(I could tell you endless stories about when AOL first entered the European market–former head Steve Case tried and failed to get to get the Europe Online moniker–but that would make you realize just what a digital antique I am.)

Here are the Falco and Grant memos:

From: Randy Falco
To: ADTECH Global; Platform-A Europe; Intl Employees; US Employees
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 9:01:13 PM
Subject: Organizational Announcement

Dear AOL colleague,

I’m writing to tell you that Maneesh Dhir, head of our international efforts, has decided that after 10 long and fruitful years with AOL, it’s time to start the next chapter in his career.

Since coming to the company in 1999 as part of AOL’s Netscape acquisition, Maneesh has made many important contributions to AOL. Most recently, of course, he was instrumental in the growth of AOL’s presence worldwide. Under his leadership, AOL went from a company with a consumer presence in just four countries outside the U.S. to one that is now in 38 countries–including India–in less than two years. Maneesh was also a key advocate for the rebuilding of our product development efforts so we could more effectively and efficiently launch products worldwide.

Just as important, Maneesh helped us learn the benefits of tapping into a worldwide pool of talent. It was his idea to open an AOL call center in Bangalore in 2002, which quickly became our largest. Two years later, he pushed for the creation of the Bangalore Development Center and the Bangalore Knowledge Center–important centers for technology, finance, analytics and shared services that are now part of the AOL India operations.

Thanks to these and many other accomplishments, we are now well positioned for global growth in all three of our key businesses–MediaGlow, Platform-A and People Networks–as well as our Products & Technologies division.

Having done all this, Maneesh told me he’s ready to return to his entrepreneurial roots. He’ll be staying on for a couple of months to help ensure a smooth transition. There will be subsequent information outlining organizational changes coming shortly.

Please join me in thanking Maneesh for all he’s done for AOL and wishing him the very best on his future endeavors.

Randy

From: Ron Grant
To: ADTECH Global; Platform-A Europe; Intl Employees; US Employees
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 9:05:37 PM
Subject: Organization Update

Dear AOL colleague,

I want to join Randy in thanking Maneesh Dhir for his outstanding contributions to AOL. I’ve known Maneesh for years, and he’s always been a tireless champion of AOL and of our global ambitions. I’m proud of all that he and his team have accomplished.

With Maneesh’s decision to return to his entrepreneurial roots, we’re taking the opportunity to make organizational changes that will build on the progress he and our international team have achieved.

Our next step is to more closely align and centralize our global publishing efforts under the newly formed MediaGlow business unit, headed by Bill Wilson. Over the last year, we have grown the MediaGlow audience dramatically through our highly efficient content development model. We believe that a more centralized infrastructure will enable us to accelerate MediaGlow’s global growth.

As a result, Dana Dunne, who oversees our European publishing business, will now report directly to Bill. In addition, our publishing businesses in India, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Canada will all report in to MediaGlow.

We are also aligning our global technologies and search organizations under Ted Cahall. With this move, our AOL India operations led by Philip Nelson will now report in to Ted, as will Bill McGrath, who heads our ASA team and also oversees the International development team in Bangalore. Ponnapa PG will now report to Phil, who will be working with his team to finalize the India realignment over the next few weeks. Lastly, Joe Arcuri is leaving AOL Canada and his direct reports will be aligned with their counterparts in New York and Dulles.

Please join me in thanking Maneesh for his many contributions and wishing him well.

Ron

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.

Indeed, Brockman now calls the event the “Edge Dinner,” after his lively Edge Web site, where he presides over a variety of eclectic online debates and discussions (in January, for example, the topic was: “DOES THE EMPIRICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE CONTRADICT THE REVELATORY NATURE OF FAITH?”).

Since I managed to miss the fete entirely (embarrassing confession: I fell dead asleep at 7 p.m. and did not wake until the next morning) and could not chronicle it, Brockman allowed me to post some photos from the event taken by him and by former Microsoft research guru and current intellectual property mogul Nathan Myhrvold.

Here are some, and you can see the rest here (click on the images to make them larger):

Google co-founder Larry Page and Applied Minds’ Danny Hillis

Former AOL kingpin and Revolution Health’s Steve Case and Jean Case, Case Foundation

Twitter CEO Evan Williams and Neoteny’s Joi Ito

Nathan Myhrvold, Google’s Marissa Mayer and Nathan Wolfe of Stanford University

Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos

Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates and DEKA’s Dean Kamen

New Media Nabobs Tim O’Reilly and Arianna Huffington

BoomTown always enjoys chatting with the always sunny Loïc Le Meur of Seesmic (and will, in fact, be appearing at his Paris-based digital conference in December, called Le Web).

But I am not quite sure what to make of his big, happy smile that was in this picture above (click in the image to make it larger), 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.

Money–or, more accurately, non-money–quote from the Times piece:

“To preserve cash, many tech start-ups are rushing to lay off employees and cut expenses. They are shelving their dreams of Google-size riches and getting small, humble and thrifty, all with the more modest goal of surviving the coming economic winter.”

In a less puritan mode, Seesmic raised $6 million in May from a bunch of high-profile angels, of $12 million total.

They include LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, former AOL head Steve Case, SoftTech VC Jeff Clavier, entrepreneur Mark Pincus, former Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Parekh, entrepreneur Ariel Poler, investor Ron Conway, FON founder Martin Varsavsky and an investment group called Atomico founded by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Tech bloggers Jeff Pulver, Michael Arrington and Dan Gillmor have also invested.

Now, Le Meur is trying to stretch his dollars in the economic downturn, spurred by venture capitalists who have been pressing entrepreneurs like him to do so.

“If I can’t make this work in three years it will be a failure,” Mr. Le Meur said to the Times. “If I can and I get through this, it will be much stronger.”

In other words, what doesn’t kill us …

C’est la vie in Silicon Valley!

But in more bon-vivant times, back in February, I did a video post on my happier visit to Seesmic’s San Francisco HQ.

(Note: Many in the video are no longer at Seesmic and neither are the shows discussed, as well as the now-defunct Web 2.0 sentiments about growth without revenue.)

Here’s the video:

Image Credit: Jim Wilson/New York Times

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 reliable 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 the Web and monetize that content–would not disclose the price it paid for the Princeton, N.J.-based AddThis.

My guess: A few million dollars in cash and maybe more in some kind of stock swap.

What exactly is Clearspring getting for this?

For starters, a tiny icon with a lot of popularity to help it toward its goal of being the universal sharing standard in the new socially-networked Web paradigm.

Clearspring claims the pair together will reach 20 billion views per month and more than 200 million unique visitors, noting it would now have a “worldwide audience comparable to the seventh largest Web property.”

While adding up such piecemeal traffic is not quite the same to advertisers as a major central Web site like Yahoo (YHOO), for example, AddThis is the most used tool for sharing Web pages through email or from Web site to Web site.

Its main competitors are ShareThis and Yahoo’s Del.icio.us, even though it has only a handful of employees.

Of course, that viral success around universal sharing might not mean massive revenue generation, even if it is a popular consumer tool.

But Ted Leonsis, chairman of the board at Clearspring, and CEO Hooman Radfar said revenue would come via advertising and, eventually, valuable data analytics the services collect about Web behavior.

Currently, said Leonsis, AddThis has negligible revenue and Clearspring has about $10 million in annual sales. Neither is currently profitable.

Nonetheless, Radfar said, “AddThis is the biggest small thing on the Web,” referring to its tiny icon that expands to offer users a choice of Internet sharing services and updating tools to a variety of social networks.

And indeed, AddThis icons are widespread across the Web, seen mostly at the bottom of content items on big sites like Time.com and MySpace.

While some question whether a big business can be created through such a far-flung network, Leonsis–one of the early execs at AOL in its glory days–said it was how the Web is evolving.

“If you said to me 10 years ago that you were going to be successful by sending people away from your site, I would have said you were crazy,” said Leonsis. “But that is what the Web is about now, and having a central network that can track this is important for advertisers.”

Well, we’ll see about that, but Clearspring certainly has a lot of money to try.

The company has received more than $35 million in funding since it was founded in 2004. Investors include former AOL head Steve Case, as well as the venture firm New Enterprise Associates.

Clearspring has about 100 employees.

Oh, there had to be much, much gnashing of teeth in the corporate offices of 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.

Longtime media exec Pittman was the former star AOLer, whose nickname was Bob “Pitchman” for his smooth-as-silk selling and even more marked spinning skills.

But the Web 1.0 supernova fell quickly to earth, after the online service merged with Time Warner (TWX) in early 2001, in what is now considered one of the more significant world-class corporate disasters.

After being tossed out of AOL Time Warner in mid-2002, Pittman (pictured here), along with AOL head Steve Case, was blamed for the stock decline and other woes at the media giant by the Time Warner side, whose deep bitterness toward him has never really faded away.

Now, with Time Warner trying to make a deal to sell the AOL unit for up to $10 billion to Yahoo or Microsoft–despite it being valued at $20 billion only a few years ago–Pittman’s small but impressive score has got to grate.

“I have been associated with the start-up, turnaround or acceleration of many companies and major brands, and rarely have I seen the kind of creativity, commitment and passion I’ve seen day in and day out at DailyCandy,” said Pittman in a letter to DailyCandy staff yesterday about the sale. “And the results speak for themselves: Since we made our investment in 2003, subscriptions have grown from just over 200,000 to over 2.5 million.”

In the letter, Pittman said the company’s EBITDA was over $10 million this year on revenues of $25 million.

This is certainly different from the situation almost exactly six years ago when Pittman was driven out of the then-named 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,” which was published in 2003.

The section comes from Chapter Six, “Way, Way After the Goldrush,” as the deal imploded:

THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE NO BUSINESS

But while Time Warnerites rejoiced in their hope that the merger turmoil was finally over, the company’s troubles wouldn’t leave the front pages for a long time to come.

We’ll see if that has changed at all, after Time Warner announces its second quarter earnings later today.

The reason is a noncompete Miller (pictured here) 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.

According to sources at Time Warner (TWX), the decision came from on high at corporate and not from the AOL unit. And it is not due to jealousy over attention Miller has received of late–Microsoft was also interested in hiring him to take over for departing exec Kevin Johnson.

Miller, sources said, was called by Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes (pictured here) last night and told by him, “We’ve changed our mind.”

Why?

Well, to be sure, Miller is no Time Warner favorite, even after being gone for almost two years.

But Miller, whom Time Warner and AOL execs never miss an opportunity to bash, off the record, is also no threat to AOL, which he actually helped revive from the ruins of the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger.

While working on my second book about AOL in 2002, I will always remember visiting Miller at AOL HQ in Dulles, Va.–where he took up residence in former AOL exec Bob Pittman’s office–and finding him unusually calm after he got the thankless job of following Pittman and AOL icon Steve Case.

Time Warner forces, in the form of new CEO Dick Parsons, had finally managed to take back control of the company and–in a fit of misguided pique–brought holy hell down on the AOL unit.

It was a profoundly emotional reaction, which cost Time Warner precious years and much, much money, as the Internet business revived itself and AOL largely sat on the sidelines.

Miller was in the unenviable position of cleaning up the mess, while also having to listen to endless griping from his bosses.

And, despite the line being put out by Time Warner, he did a pretty good job.

While he might have dumped the dial-up business sooner and been more of an organized manager (the two big complaints about him), Miller did strike AOL’s lucrative Google search ad deal and also bought Advertising.com. (He also tried to buy YouTube, to no avail.)

That purchase should be reason enough for Time Warner to erect a small altar to him, given that it is one of AOL’s only truly valuable assets and the reason Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) have been interested in possibly buying the unit.

But no.

Instead, there is the usual he-said-she-said wrangling about whether Miller got approval for being let out of the noncompete clause.

Time Warner apparently claims Miller never got an official waiver, and Miller forces say Bewkes okayed the issue weeks ago, when it was first announced that Miller was one of the board picks being put forth by activist investor Carl Icahn.

It defies belief to go with Time Warner version, given everyone and their mother’s mother knew Miller was the likely pick of both Icahn and, especially, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.

More interesting is why Time Warner would choose to speak now, especially on the day of Yahoo’s board meeting.

At the meeting, the Yahoo board approved expanding its number of directors from 9 to 11 and formally voted to let Icahn take over the seat being vacated by Robert Kotick.

Miller was the shoo-in, with other likely choices. including former Nextel (S) exec John Chapple, media exec Frank Biondi and former Grey Global Advertising head Edward Meyer.

Perhaps Bewkes imagines somehow that Miller will be a leverage point in talks Time Warner has been having with Yahoo to be acquired. But the smooth exec is an expert negotiator and that seems unlikely.

More likely is that those talks, like AOL’s talks with Microsoft, have gone a little cold of late as everyone shuts up and stops making ill-conceived moves, to show Wall Street that they have their forward-leaning Internet strategies figured out.

No one does. Not Yahoo. Not Microsoft. And, most definitely, not Time Warner’s AOL.

That’s why Bewkes should stop the saber-rattling and free Miller to serve on the Yahoo board.

Yahoo could benefit and, as it stands now, Time Warner just looks silly–it does not want Miller, but it doesn’t want anyone else to have him.

My three-year-old knows how to share better than that.

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 negotiations with Microsoft (MSFT).

(Which is kind of obvious when you actually think about it, given that Bostock is mired in this takeover collapse mess up to his own at-risk neck along with Yang. Bostock has been deeply involved all along and will likely continue to be.)

Thus, lots of smoke and little fire, contrary to rumor-based reports, like this one from TechCrunch–most of which seem to hang on the thinnest of threads (Where in the world is Yahoo board member Eric Hippeau?).

More importantly, even though they move share price, these rumors show almost no knowledge of how public company boards actually operate, which is to say with slug-like speed, even when under fire as Yahoo clearly is.

And if Yang were to go, I would guess it would be under his own steam or he’d be run out with Yahoo’s directors on a rail by angry shareholders.

Still, as a post yesterday of BoomTown’s book excerpt on the AOL Time Warner (TWX) debacle illustrates, even shoving aside a much-pilloried exec like former Chairman Steve Case, who presided over the merger disaster of all time, it took months and months and months and months and finally came well after the wheels fell off the bus there in a move made by Case and not his detractors.

And such a move to denude Yang, in the midst of the most trying time for the company, would make Yahoo’s board seem like particularly thickheaded morons–backing Yang strongly one day and throwing him overboard the next.

That is not to say Yang has not lost a mountain of credibility with Wall Street, investors, his own employees and in the industry in general, over the way he has handled the situation with Microsoft. The fallout from the debacle has damaged him badly.

The reviews are in and it is pretty much one million angry thumbs down.

Unfortunately, Yahoo’s leadership team has not exactly distinguished itself in the aftermath with their public statements, whether it be Bostock’s fanciful musings that Yahoo had the support of shareholders or President Sue Decker’s ungracious dissing of disgruntled Yahoo employees or pretty much the bulk of the backpedaling Yang has done.

And I don’t even know what to say about the excuse about the $33 offer not being written down as a problem by Yahoo execs, which makes them all move a little closer to Nearly Headless Nick in “Harry Potter,” in my estimation.

I do get their fervent need to explain themselves, especially in the face of such ferocious criticism.

But it has been so cringe-inducing to watch, that part of me wishes they would slink back into that cave Yang and his team have been living in all year long.

Obviously, Yang cannot and must now take the heat and find a way to clearly articulate a really good vision of what lies ahead for Yahoo.

That does not mean dangling the possibility of another deal with Microsoft to placate critics or pretending Yahoo wanted such a merger.

The very fact that Yang brought the painfully terse Yahoo Co-Founder and tech guru David Filo–who has fervently opposed a lot of Yahoo hookups in the past, like with eBay (EBAY) many years ago–with him to the key meeting last weekend with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was all I needed to know to determine that the company did not want to sell.

So, Yang and the board got what they wanted–for now, at least–which is a very painful dose of independence.

If they want that to mean going back to talk with Microsoft, Yahoo should stop playing games and do so with a minimal amount of jockeying.

If it means making a series of bold moves to focus and define its business, then Yahoo should do that and quickly.

And if Yang can’t lead or is still lonely–he said last year of the CEO job, “It is a lonely job in the sense that you have to make some of the tough calls”–he needs to step aside for a new leader of Yahoo.

Because, even if Yang lives to fight another day, this much is clear: The clock is running down for him and his stewardship of Yahoo.

Yang is, as Dean Vernon Wormer of “Animal House” said so eloquently, on double secret probation.

So, if I were to predict, I would say six months without meaningful change is all he has.

And after that, I would imagine, is when the blade really starts really falling.

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

All told, between two funds, Capital Research owns 16% of Yahoo. The fund run by Crawford, a legendary money manager and media power broker, holds 6% of that total. No surprise, then, that those funds took a big hit yesterday after the Microsoft takeover bid for Yahoo collapsed.

So a lot of people paid attention yesterday when Crawford, in a high-profile interview with The Wall Street Journal, laid into Yang (pictured here) in such an in-your-face manner.

Said Crawford: “I’m extremely disappointed in Jerry Yang. I think he overplayed a weak hand.”

Crawford was fuming even more to the New York Times yesterday:

“I am extremely angry at Jerry Yang and at the so-called independent board. … I’m hoping that there is such an outpouring of outrage that the board is embarrassed into revisiting this thing, but I’m not optimistic about that.”

Uh-oh, because BoomTown has seen this story before.

It was back in 2002 and the exec under Crawford’s withering gaze then was former AOL Time Warner (TWX) Chairman Steve Case (pictured here).

Jerry Yang might want to take notes, as the situations are a little too familiar to ignore.

Thus, here is a longish excerpt from my book, “There Must Be a Pony In Here Somewhere,” which shows just how active and relentless Crawford can be as an investor when he gets irked by execs who disappoint him:

Gordon Crawford was still very, very angry.

“He did not do it to embarrass Steve,” said this person. “Steve was just a festering boil at AOL that needed to be cauterized and removed.”

Note: Case resigned on Jan. 12, 2003.

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 Silicon Valley (ex-Googlers involved make it hotter still!).

You don’t know?

Neither does most of the human race, in truth, which is just getting around to noticing Facebook and maybe, just maybe, figuring out how to properly use a SuperPoke (my advice: never ever!).

And, while Twitter is amazing in many ways, its tech glitches don’t deserve this level of emergency alarms.

But that has not stopped the echo chamber of Silicon Valley from making a lot of really noisy noise about the indignity of it all.

Isn’t there a recent Sarah Lacy interview with some random Web 2.0 player they could egregiously overreact to instead?

In a weird way, though, this reminds me of the outrage when AOL (TWX) went down for 19 hours in August of 1996. (To date myself, I was actually at AOL HQ in Virginia at that very time with CEO Steve Case, working on my first book.)

At the time, AOL’s 6.3 million users had their first collective digital nervous breakdown and the outage resulted in national headlines–as well as later governmental investigations–across the nation.

“If this (outage) is a sign that AOL can’t handle its growth, that’s a very bad message for the professionals that use it,” Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, said ominously to CNN at the time.

Now, 6.3 million users over a decade ago in today’s terms is a lot more in comparison to Twitter’s current users.

But the difference: Today, one single person like Scoble can tweet louder than millions can complain and it sounds like it is exactly the same thing.