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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Yahoo confirmed the news–first reported by BoomTown and in The Wall Street Journal last night–that it was buying Xoopit, the San Francisco social email company.

And it did so in both a blog post and on Twitter, as you can see here:

@karaswisher @jvascellaro Your scoops confirmed http://bit.ly/gpOT2.

Well, thanks! But we are already onto new scoops, so try to keep up!

The price for the acquisition, which Yahoo did not reveal, was about $20 million, according to sources.

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Yahoo plans on announcing Thursday that it has bought Xoopit for a price in the $20 million range, according to several sources, one of its first acquisitions in a long while.

Reached late this afternoon by BoomTown, a Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment about the purchase. Xoopit did not respond to emails earlier today.

But sources said it was a done deal to buy the San Francisco-based social email start-up that finds photos, videos, links and other files in email so that users can surface and then share them.

Xoopit’s investors–Accel Partners and Foundation Capital, along with several angel investors–have pumped about $6.5 million into the company since 2006.

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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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Yesterday, Yahoo held a San Francisco event where it finally launched a lot of the new open and social elements that it has long said it was injecting into its most popular products.

(BoomTown also interviewed top Yahoo execs Tapan Bhat and Ash Patel about the moves.)

For a look-see, here is an official Yahoo video about the launch and some screenshots of the changes.

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Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that had been speculated last week, after he did not end up taking another position as head of MySpace Music.

Van Natta’s arrival at Playlist was not the only news for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up–former AOL exec Bob Pittman’s Pilot Investment Group is also investing an undisclosed amount of money in Playlist, and Pittman will join its board.

The site, which has been called Project Playlist, had previously raised several million dollars. The new round of funding super-sized that, sources said, hovering at about $18 million.

“Discovery around music is exploding on the Internet,” said Van Natta to BoomTown, in an interview this afternoon, giving it as his main reason for joining Playlist.

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In its ongoing renovation of its offerings–last month it began rolling out a new homepage–Yahoo is unveiling a new online calendar, with a passel of new bells and whistles, to a small group of users worldwide.

Overall, it is a good-looking, simple and clean design–which will eventually be extended to all of Yahoo’s 8.1 million calendar users worldwide.

And, incredibly, although Yahoo’s is the top online calendar in the world, it has been 10 years since the Internet giant updated it.

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Although about one-third of its user base–30 million people–has already switched over to its new design, which has been opt-in since July, Facebook will now officially start to move the entire site and the other 70 million Facebookers.

The changeover–which is not optional–will be complete in a few weeks, Facebook said.

I do like the new look, which is definitely cleaner and simpler, although it makes the experience a little more disjointed, since everyone’s profile is now cut up into tabs.

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Yesterday, BoomTown wrote a piece about Yahoo’s worries about the scrutiny that the monopolistic combination of Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail would get, if it merged with the software giant.

The issue–which has not gotten a lot of attention–is actually a major sticking point in the price negotiations going on this weekend between the companies, as Yahoo seeks solid downside protection if the deal becomes mired in approval issues by governmental authorities due to email and instant messaging dominance on the Web.

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So why is Yahoo’s board holding out for a higher price than Microsoft wants to offer to raise it?

According to sources close to Yahoo, one of the more important reasons Yahoo wants a higher price has a lot to do with worries about the domination of the email and communications market if a merger with Microsoft took place and the threat of regulatory action that would force the companies to divest those assets.

Sources said that Yahoo wants a large cushion in case the government finds the combination of Yahoo Mail and Hotmail too much.

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