The ever-bickering crop of current Republican Presidential nominees dragging themselves to the first Iowa vote in the coming weeks almost makes you wish for a true political character to liven up the proceedings.

Or some nostalgia for the last go-round, which is definitely present in this trailer for HBO’s upcoming adaptation of “Game Change,” the lively book about the 2008 campaign, featuring the always telegenic Sarah Palin.

The former Alaska governor is played this time around by Julianne Moore, who really looks and sounds like the GOP VP candidate.

You betcha, she does:

A few weeks ago, several sources at Yahoo begin telling BoomTown about a mysterious “Project Rushmore,” which was described as a massive integration of major social networking sites across the giant Internet portal.

Now, the first unveiling of Project Rushmore comes with this morning’s announcement that Yahoo (YHOO) will be integrating Facebook Connect with its many properties–from its powerful media sites to its Flickr photo service to its email.

Once deployed–in the first half of next year, said Yahoo–Yahoo users can monitor their full Facebook feed on the site and Facebook users will have their Yahoo activity displayed on their news feed, if they choose to.

The companies said no money will be exchanged in the five-year deal; nor will there be any other financial or advertising element.

This is a major step for Yahoo, which has long touted its openness, and a significant upgrade to the company’s relationship with Facebook.

It’s also more than ironic, as Yahoo had been very close to acquiring Facebook for just over $1 billion several years ago, in a should-have deal that went south.

Currently, Facebook users can update their status and access their stream via an app on the Yahoo homepage. They can also share to Facebook using buttons on Yahoo, and Facebook can access contacts on Yahoo.

But the relationship between the pair–which have some of the largest audiences on the Web between them–has been relatively thin until now.

This has been a glaring problem for Yahoo, which has also promised a lot of socialization throughout the service, but has not really provided it for users. The company hopes this tight link with the fast-growing Facebook will send users back to Yahoo.

Facebook–via Facebook Connect, which allows users to log on to participating sites with their identity on the service–is perhaps the bigger winner here.

The huge amount of data from the activities from one of the most trafficked sites on the Web–with upward of 500 million users–will further solidify its growing role as a central hub of a user’s Web life.

Another irony: This was the role Yahoo held for many years and has been losing to, yes, Facebook.

Yahoo is still aiming to be the central hub for a lot of people too, said Jim Stoneham, Yahoo’s VP of Communities, who noted that slightly more than half of Yahoo users also have Facebook accounts.

“That’s highly relevant that a lot of people use both,” said Stoneham. “So, there should be a strong bond across both sites.”

Added Stoneham: “This will be a done on a deep level into Yahoo.”

Stoneheam declined to comment on whether and when the service would be striking similar deals with other networking sites.

But sources told me that Twitter and LinkedIn are likely candidates, as well as MySpace.

That would, of course, account for the four presidential stone faces on Mount Rushmore–George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

Other big Internet companies are getting into the social act. Separately, both Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) recently struck a data-mining deal with Twitter and Microsoft also did so with Facebook.

So, such an overall move by Yahoo is an important and necessary one–and also very late in coming–since it completely missed the social networking train and needs to figure out how to be part of it in a way that is useful to users and open.

“This relationship pushes us really far forward [toward openness],” said Cody Simms, senior director of product management for Yahoo’s open strategy. “And it helps our users be more social, which they want to be wherever they are.”

And presumably, Yahoo hopes these moves will keep users on Yahoo a little longer while doing that.

Here is the full blog post from Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal by Stoneham:

Update once to share with many on Yahoo! and Facebook

Posted December 2nd, 2009 at 6:29 am by Lucas Mast, Blog Editor

We have good news to share with everyone who uses Yahoo! and Facebook–in the first half of 2010 we will open the door between two of the Internet’s largest online communities. You will be able to see your Facebook friends’ activities on Yahoo! and share Yahoo! content–ratings, photos, article comments, and more–directly on your Facebook stream. We’re doing this by deeply integrating a service called Facebook Connect across Yahoo! properties worldwide, which we announced today.

As the place where over 500 million people visit every month, Yahoo!’s goal is to bring together social experiences from across the web, and provide one place for people to access information and stay in touch with the people they care about most.

Yahoo!’s integration of Facebook Connect will provide you with richer experiences across the Yahoo! products you use every day, such as Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Sports. In the future, you’ll be able to choose where you want to update your status message–from destinations across Yahoo!–or directly on Facebook.

We are doing this as part of our commitment to deliver more personally relevant Internet experiences, so watch for more details in the New Year!

Jim Stoneham, VP of Communities for Yahoo!

And, if you are a glutton for punishment, here’s the full press release from Yahoo:

Yahoo! Extends Facebook Integration to Bring Together Social Experiences From Across the Web

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec. 2, 2009–Continuing its commitment to be the center of people’s online lives, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) today announced further integration with Facebook that unites social experiences from across the Web to provide a place for consumers to enjoy meaningful content and stay in touch with the people they care about most.

“With this integration, we are opening the door for two of the Internet’s largest online communities to make it easier for people to stay connected,” said Jim Stoneham, vice president of Communities for Yahoo!. “It also enables us to further the Yahoo! Open Strategy, which is aimed at making experiences dramatically more open, social and personally relevant for the more than 500 million people that visit Yahoo! each month.”

Yahoo!’s Facebook Connect integration will give consumers richer experiences on Yahoo!, including in Yahoo! Mail and on properties like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, and Yahoo! Finance. It will enable them to connect with Facebook friends on Yahoo!, view a feed of their friends’ related activity on Yahoo!, and share content–such as photos from Flickr or comments on news stories–with all of their friends on Facebook. The content that consumers share with Facebook friends will then create a loop that drives visitors back to Yahoo!.

This partnership extends the current Facebook integration on Yahoo! which enables Facebook users to access their stream and update their status from the Yahoo! homepage, provides “Share on Facebook” options across the Yahoo! network, and allows Facebook to access Yahoo! Contacts. People using both Yahoo! and Facebook will soon be able to share updates across both networks, creating a richer and more relevant social experience by connecting the broad range of Yahoo! content and services with their friends on Facebook.

“As one of the largest sites on the Web, Yahoo! is an ideal partner to integrate with Facebook Connect, enabling users to share meaningful content with their friends on Facebook from Yahoo’s wide range of category-leading properties,” said Ethan Beard, director of Facebook Developer Network.

The integration is expected to begin in the first half of 2010.

[Photo credit: Dean Franklin under the Creative Commons attribution license.

In what is quite possibly the most spot-on comment about Twitter that BoomTown has heard thus far, Harvard University Professor Jonathan Zittrain said:

“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”

Zittrain was being quoted in a New York Times piece today about the use of Twitter by those protesting the election results in Iran, as other means of modern mass communications–such as email, Facebook and texting–got blocked.

In other words, Twitter is so simplistic and silly that it is a perfect digital tool to overthrow a government–which is kind of makes the trendy microblogging service the Forrest Gump of international relations.

Stupid is as stupid does, of course, but what it does illustrate quite smartly is that word of mouth–a concept as old as humanity–remains the most powerful way of distributing information.

While not always reliable, masses of people chattering away has always been the most fluid way in which news has been disseminated and received. Although much of that can be mundane and borderline idiotic, one cannot deny its impact.

What one can deny, though, is the hype that inevitably follows in the wake of every one of these breakthrough technologies like Twitter.

That’s a mistake, because it is how the tools are used by people, more than the tools themselves, that should be the focus.

Still, the media hyping of tech tools as savior is reliably annoying.

Television, of course, changed the presidential elections, as radio had before that.

And, more recently, weren’t mobile phone cameras critical in reporting the bombing in London’s Underground in 2005?

Or wasn’t Facebook key to protests in Burma in 2008?

And, even more profoundly, didn’t the simple fax machine get lauded during the uprising in China’s Tiananmen Square in Beijing as an heroic gadget?

Reported Time magazine in 1989:

“When word of the massacre in Tiananmen Square first reached the University of Michigan, the 250 Chinese students studying there jumped into action: they purchased a fax machine. Daily summaries of Western news accounts and photographs were faxed to universities, government offices, hospitals and businesses in major cities in China to provide an alternative to the government’s distorted press reports. The Chinese students traded fax numbers back home along the computer network that links them around the U.S. The fax brigades at Michigan were duplicated on many other campuses.”

Ironically, hardly anyone today uses a fax machine at all, having moved onto more effective methods of sending out critical news, data, pictures, updates and more.

Like Twitter today, which deserves this moment in the sun, to be sure, as long as it lasts.

Which it won’t, as people move onto the next way to do what they have always done, which is to connect.

As for tomorrow, who knows?

After all, digital life was, is and will always be like a box of chocolates–you never know what you’re gonna get.

At least, according to this excerpt from a 10-questions interview former Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox, who now contributes to Time magazine’s Swampland blog, did with Stop Smiling magazine recently.

Cox (pictured here) was on a blogger panel at our third D: All Things Digital conference in 2005, where she talked about the changes in the media industry due to the rise of blogs.

At the time, there was a lot of controversy about the rise of bloggers.

But now, in questions No. 7 and 8 here, Cox discusses the huge differences in the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, in terms of blogs, and how the image of bloggers has shifted dramatically with mainstream media.

From Cox’s lips to traditional journalists’ ears.

Here are the excerpts:

Q7: You’ve been around long enough to see the differences between the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns. Do you have any strong feelings about how this year differs from the Kerry-Bush election, in terms of the role that blogs play?

AMC: In 2004, MTV hired me to cover the Democratic convention, and I swear I did two or three interviews just on the fact that I was a blogger covering the convention. I doubt that would happen today. In 2004, people would be highly suspicious of me, because at any moment I could break out my computer and blog about them. I went to YearlyKos in 2006, as one of my first assignments for Time, and I was hanging out with the real reporters, and there was this running joke: As soon as someone said something off-color or impolitic, you’d say, “Hey, I’m gonna blog that.” Like a taunt. In 2008, I was at a Republican debate during the primaries, and I looked around the filing center and everyone was blogging. Everyone has that force propelling them to publish whatever they can. Anything that happens to them is now fodder for a Washington Post blog.

Q8: Do you think more traditional reporters still frown on blogging as if it were not a serious form of journalism?

AMC: The whole “are bloggers journalists?” question, which was always stupid, is finally fading, especially thanks to people like Josh Marshall [of Talking Points Memo], who have shown you don’t have to have a big organization behind you to be a journalist. The defining characteristic of a journalist is what you produce. I think it’s changed the question from “are bloggers journalists?” to “what is journalism?” And that is a perfectly acceptable debate to have. There’s never going to be an answer, but it starts us at a better place than simply talking about delivery systems.”

Ana

In this one just released, former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel–who made a run at the Democratic presidential nomination and is now trying to be the Libertarian Party candidate and who is not, let us be honest, Obamalicious–sings with the now-famous Obama Girl.

Now when I say sings, I am using the term rather loosely, as you will see in the video.

Still, there is a game of Twister, some pie and an attempt at rap and dancing that would be painful if it were not so cute.

Also, my favorite, Gravel says at the end as Obama Girl walks away: “If you have second thoughts, I’m on Twitter!”

Well, someone outside of Silicon Valley has to be.

Here’s the video: