According to sources, Facebook has moved well-regarded exec Emily White to a new job as director of business operations at its Instagram mobile photo-sharing unit.

In this capacity, she will work with Instagram head and co-founder Kevin Systrom to scale nascent efforts to expand partnerships, improve user operations and, presumably, come up with ways to make some money. The fast-growing service, which the social networking site bought a year ago in a billion-dollar mega-deal, has been popular with consumers, but it has not focused as much on its business operations.

(Update: Facebook confirmed the move and also released this statement from Systrom: “I’m excited to bring Emily White onto the Instagram team. As we continue to scale our operation to support over 100 million active users, her experience with partnerships and business operations will play a major role in our future success.”)

In fact, related to business, it has waded more into controversy — such as when changes to its terms of service suggested that Instagram could sell user photos to advertisers, a change that was quickly rescinded by Systrom. That said, it left the door open to selling advertising of some sort on the app.

White has a lot of experience in the online ad space in smoothing out and organizing ops, both at Google — where she previously worked — and at Facebook, where she started in the deal-making arena and later worked on mobile partnerships.

White — who has recently been courted by other Internet startups, reportedly including scrapbooking phenom Pinterest — is also on the board of women’s yoga and running gear retailer Lululemon. That’s good since part of her new job will be to get more big brands integrated into Instagram, which has already begun to do that with some initial level of success.

Systrom will continue to focus more on product development and overall strategy and vision, which he has done since Instagram was purchased last April.

(That photo above is of White, which she just posted on her Instagram account — natch!)

According to sources, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is close to launching a new startup called Jelly, which one person called a “native mobile” effort.

While it’s not clear exactly what that means, sources said the well-known entrepreneur has already hired four or five employees to form a team on the mystery product that will likely be aimed at smartphones and tablets.

It’s an interesting move, since Stone is also running a small incubator called Obvious with one of his Twitter co-founders, Ev Williams. They left their daily roles at the high-profile microblogging service to create Obvious, which has startups such as Lift, Branch and Medium in its portfolio.

There has been low-level chatter in Silicon Valley about Stone’s startup, which some have taken to mean he is no longer working as much with Williams at Obvious. But sources said that is not the case and both are involved in helping their small group of startups.

That said, Williams has been focusing more on Medium, an effort to rejigger blogging and content platforms. Meanwhile, another Obvious principal, Jason Goldman, has been focused on Branch, an online conversation-focused site.

Presumably, Obvious will invest in Jelly, but that’s not clear.

Zynga CIO Debra Chrapaty, who has also done high-ranking stints at other big companies such as Cisco and Microsoft, has been named CEO of enterprise cloud storage company Nirvanix.

She replaces Dru Borden, who will remain at the San Diego-based company as SVP of planning and development and who will also remain a director. Chrapaty will also remain executive chairwoman of the board of Nirvanix, which has investments from Khosla Ventures and Intel Capital.

Chrapaty has most recently been CIO of Zynga, but was also SVP of Cisco’s collaboration software unit and was a corporate VP at Microsoft. She was also president and COO of E*Trade Technologies.

In an email to me, Chrapaty wrote: “I had a great run at Zynga, wish the company and the team the best. But this is a really unique opportunity to leverage a company that is at the center of unstoppable trends (to cloud which hasn’t really affected Fortune 1000 storage yet) and a company that already has some great existing people and customers and investors you have known for decades.”

Zynga has seen a number of high-level departures and top management reorgs in recent months, as it seeks to turn around its recent rocky performance.

Zynga said that Chrapaty, who was hired from Cisco in 2011, will be replaced by Zynga exec Dorion Carroll.

“We thank Debra for her leadership and contributions to Zynga over the past years and wish her luck in her future endeavors,” said Zynga COO David Ko in a statement. “As one of our Zynga Fellows, Dorion has provided direction, leadership and management across numerous technology and products teams at Zynga over the past three years as well as being one of our most senior technology leaders.”

Earlier today, Yahoo said it had acquired the trendy and decidedly stylish news reading app Summly, along with its telegenic and very young entrepreneur Nick D’Aloisio.

Yahoo said it plans to close down the actual app and use the algorithmic summation technology that the 17-year-old D’Aloisio built with a small team of five, along with a major assist from Silicon Valley research institute SRI International, throughout its products.

While Yahoo did not disclose the price, several sources told me that the company paid $30 million — 90 percent in cash and 10 percent in stock — to buy the London-based Apple smartphone app.

And despite its elegant delivery, that’s a very high price, especially since Summly has been downloaded slightly less than one million times since launch — after a quick start amid much publicity over its founder — with about 90 million “summaries” read. Of course, like many such apps, it also had no monetization plan as yet.

What Yahoo is getting, though, is perhaps more valuable — the ability to put the fresh-faced D’Aloisio front and center of its noisy efforts to make consumers see Yahoo as a mobile-first company. That has been the goal of CEO Marissa Mayer, who has bought up a range of small mobile startups since she took over nine months ago and who has talked about the need for Yahoo to focus on the mobile arena above all.

Mayer met with D’Aloisio, said sources, although the deal was struck by voluble M&A head Jackie Reses.

Said one person close to the deal, about the founder: “Nick will be a great person to put in front of the media and consumers with Mayer to make Yahoo seem like it is a place that loves both entrepreneurs and mobile experiences, which in turn will presumably attract others like him.”

Having met the young man in question, who was in San Francisco in the fall on a fundraising trip, I can see the appeal. He’s both well-spoken and adorkable, as well as very adept at charming cranky media types like me by radiating with the kinetic energy of someone born in the mobile world (you can see that in full force in the video below with actor and Summly investor Stephen Fry).

Still, D’Aloisio is very young and presumably has a lot of other entrepreneurial goals and that’s why he agreed as part of the deal to only officially stay 18 months at Yahoo, multiple sources told me. In many cases, startup founders strike such short-term employment deals with big companies, agreeing to stay for a certain determined time period.

He will also remain in England, where he lives with his parents, said sources. In addition, only two of Summly’s employees will go to Yahoo with D’Aloisio.

That’s $10 million each, along with a nifty app Yahoo will not be using as is (too bad, as it would up the hip and fun factor of Yahoo’s apps by a factor of a gazillion if it were maintained).

“It works out on a lot of levels,” said another person close to the situation. “Nick is a founder that will make Mayer and Yahoo look cutting edge.”

Cue the parade of PR profiles of the young genius made millionaire, helping Yahoo become relevant again.

I have an email for comment into the always friendly D’Aloisio. But I don’t expect a reply, since he has apparently been specifically instructed by the martinets of Yahoo PR not to talk to me any longer — well, for 18 months at least! (Don’t worry, Nick, I don’t blame you and will still listen to whatever you are pitching next, since you are so dang compelling and I enjoyed using Summly!)

Until then, here’s the faboo Summly video, with the best chairs ever:

Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo.

And like any company going through a growth spurt, Twitter’s organizational structure has become complicated.

The company has tried breaking into multiple departments with various leaders. But as time has passed and Twitter has scaled, roles have grown confused and inefficient, and communication between some of the departments has suffered.

This is important. Some say the company thrived in its early days from its loose-knit structure, but also suffered from a clashing of big personalities, a revolving CEO seat and defecting employees across the ranks. But as the company continues its slow, steady trudge toward going public, the Twitter of today is trying to be a different animal entirely. That means working out the kinks that still exist inside its organizational makeup, and proving to the public — and the Street — that yes, Twitter is in this for the long haul.

Making this adjustment will also mean clarifying the vision of what Twitter, the product, is, and what it is meant to be. That means faster shipping of new releases, faster decisions being made, and ultimately (hopefully), a happier user base.

To remedy the most recent issues, Twitter made significant structural changes to a number of departments earlier this month, shuffling around key managers in the hope of streamlining some of the more dysfunctional aspects of the company’s interdepartmental communication.

This is likely a good thing — or Twitter wants it to be, at least. But looking back, one thing is clear: It has been a long time coming.

Twitter, not unexpectedly, declined to comment on this story.

The Old Guard

This whole thing began nearly a year and a half ago, when CEO Dick Costolo and Chairman Jack Dorsey started cherry-picking talent from some of the Valley’s top firms. They plucked away Google engineers by the handful, recruiting hundreds of them to staff Twitter’s large engineering operations (Costolo has said more than half of Twitter is made up of engineers).

The idea back then was to restaff some of the key positions in the company with seasoned vets across the four major departments — Product, Design, Engineering and Revenue — the heads of which would report directly to Costolo.

Twitter Product VP Michael Sippey

But the old layout, as it was set up, was complicated. Former SAY Media vet Michael Sippey led as VP of consumer product development, while Othman Laraki was VP of product growth. Revenue had Adam Bain as president of global revenue, with Kevin Weil as his deputy of sorts, acting as director of revenue product. Design was led by Doug Bowman, but then Andrei Herasimchuk was promoted later to become overall director of design, while Bowman continued as creative director.

Lastly, Adam Messinger was poached from Oracle to join as VP of engineering infrastructure in November of 2011, while Chris Fry was brought on in April of 2012 for another key engineering role.

So that was the lay of the land. Costolo had his lieutenants, who ideally would handle things smoothly and hand up the high-level stuff to the top. But as became evident shortly thereafter, that didn’t work out.

It’s Complicated

First of all, it’s tough to have too many cooks in the kitchen. And despite the fact that this layout seemed to be streamlined, there were too many people reporting to Costolo at any given time.

As one insider told me, “This was a mess. One year ago, Dick had four product and design reports and three engineering reports.” In other words, seven different department heads, each with Costolo’s ear.

Beyond that, there were some issues inside of a few departments that contributed to stumbles in workflow.

Design

The Design department has been dysfunctional for a long time. Earlier days saw an “overall lack of process and structure,” another person told me, and a series of new managers may have been an overcorrection, from Doug Bowman to a period with Dorsey’s heavy involvement, then to Andrei Herasimchuk after his promotion.

Design VP Mike Davidson.

Thus, Mike Davidson, a veteran designer who was founding CEO of Newsvine (acquired by NBC), was picked last autumn by Sippey and Messinger to refocus the department. There have also been a series of smaller departures inside the department, and one big one — Andrei Herasimchuk left just a week after Davidson’s appointment.

I’ve been told by multiple people that the design process has improved significantly under Davidson’s reign over the past five-plus months, and he has brought in multiple new hires from the likes of Apple, Facebook and startup PicPlum. He has also increased the department size by 30 percent since his arrival.

What remains to be seen, however, is how much Davidson will improve the output of the overall department.

Engineering

The Engineering department had its own problems. And the setup has been somewhat peculiar.

Adam Messinger was poached from Oracle to act as VP of infrastructure engineering in November of 2011. But at some point along the way, Messinger switched over from infrastructure to VP of application development — essentially a product position. That’s something of a head-scratcher, because Messinger’s background isn’t in consumer products, but infrastructure — the very thing he was hired on to do.

Twitter CTO Adam Messinger

Through all of this, Design was reporting to the Engineering department instead of acting as an independent function as it once used to.

Everything Old Is New Again

So despite Twitter’s grand organizational plan set out last year, things weren’t working out. Design reporting to Engineering just wasn’t working. Engineering leadership was muddled. Costolo had too many people to listen to in order to get things done. As one insider told me, it was “a mess.”

So as of mid-March, there’s a new New World Order at Twitter, a long-overdue “consolidation and clarity in the company,” as one source put it.

Now, according to sources, the structure has been trimmed down to a handful of go-to VPs reporting to Costolo, including Michael Sippey, Chris Fry, Kevin Weil and global revenue president Adam Bain.

Sippey is getting the biggest bump. Laraki left Twitter at the end of 2012 to work on his own thing. Sippey is now vice president of Product and Design, overseeing both departments.

Senior Vice President of Engineering Chris Fry

Fry also gets a radical step up in his responsibilities. He’s now senior vice president of overall engineering. He’ll also work closely with Alex Roetter, who is now a VP in the Engineering department, working on international, growth and revenue engineering. Kevin Weil will continue to act as director of product in the revenue department.

Messinger is the man spun off here, announced last week as chief technical officer of Twitter. It’s curious, though; sources said that in his new position, Messinger lost many — if not all — of the staff directly reporting to him, which would make it seem a less-than-desirable position to be in. I’m also told that Messinger had issues with recruiting enough engineers, a serious problem at an organization of Twitter’s size and scale. Recruiting, as any tech company will tell you, is of the utmost importance.

Of course, it could be that Messinger is better as a high-level thinker, as I’ve been told — someone who would do better focusing on the “big-picture” aspects of Twitter and what it will look like in the future, rather than down in the engineering trenches. Still, perhaps Messinger won’t be satisfied with the high-level CTO role in a few months, and depart for other pastures. (TBD on that one.)

To Be Continued

So that’s that. For now, most of the shifting is kaput (as far as I’m aware), and as it has been put to me, the Sippey/Fry combo is the “new world order in charge of the roadmap,” while Weil and Roetter will hold down the revenue product and engineering duties. (There were one or two other noteworthy shifts as well, including moving Raffi Krikorian up to VP of engineering in charge of Twitter’s platform.)

If all goes according to plan, you’ll hopefully see Twitter-the-product get better on a much faster-paced timetable.

Will it all work better than the previous layout? I don’t know, and I’m sure Twitter doesn’t either. We’ll have to check back in another year.

As I noted in a piece last week about the departure of Yahoo Mail head Vivek Sharma for a new job at Disney, the Silicon Valley Internet giant is likely to see a lot more execs unhappy with the new regime of CEO Marissa Mayer take off after annual bonuses start being handed out in March.

Today, it’s James Carroll, SVP of the consumer and global platform group at Yahoo.

In the job, the former Microsoft exec has been in charge of the company’s global R&D centers in China, India and the Middle East and been “responsible for Yahoo’s content, social and membership platforms and the international delivery of all Yahoo! products and services worldwide.” That has included all its efforts at internationalization, international infrastructure development and localization.

Sources said he is leaving to head international at Go Daddy, one of the world’s biggest Web hosting and domain registration companies. Go Daddy is led by former Yahoo product head Blake Irving, who had hired Carroll at Yahoo in 2010.

And, as NBC announced earlier today, editor in chief of Yahoo News, Hillary Frey, has taken a job there as editorial director of news at NBCNews.com, which is undergoing a major refurbishment. She had been at Yahoo since late 2011.

Many more to come, I am told, as execs either decide to depart or Mayer continues to clean house. It’s still unclear who will be taking over these key jobs at Yahoo.

One thing for sure: I don’t expect a comment from Yahoo PR on the changes.

According to numerous sources, Vivek Sharma, who is GM of the powerful Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger products, has left the company.

It’s not clear where Sharma — who has been at the Silicon Valley Internet giant since 2009 and has worked in a number of areas, including commerce and search — is going or what the reasons are for his departure from Yahoo.

Some sources said he clashed with CEO Marissa Mayer, who has been involved in the recent overhaul of one of Yahoo’s key consumer products, due in part to recent issues related to email vulnerability and other issues. But others said he simply wanted to move on and has a new job lined up already.

There are several other top Yahoo execs who are likely to go in the coming weeks, especially given many bonuses are awarded this month. Mayer has also been looking over her top management and wider workforce and culling it, sometimes in ways that attract national controversy and even a lawsuit.

Keeping talent and finding new blood has been an issue for the fledgling CEO. As I have previously reported, as well as others in more detail this week, she is approving all new hires herself and has put in place more stringent hiring standards at Yahoo.

Sources said she has been trying to convince a top product exec at Google to essentially replace Shashi Seth — with whom she parted ways in January — who would oversee Mail, Answers, Messenger, the homepage and possibly the media group.

In addition, her COO Henrique De Castro has a search out for a new head of the key Americas unit to man its important sales division and more in the U.S. market.

In other words, a lot of empty desks that need filling.

I have an email in for comment into Yahoo, but you know how that goes (FYI: It doesn’t).

Messinger joined Twitter in 2011 as vice president of application development in the engineering department, where he has been responsible for making key decisions regarding app design and experience, user growth, and search and relevance issues, among other duties. Previous to this, he spent close to four years at Oracle as vice president of development.

Messinger has been described as a “big picture” guy by some, and will move into working on what future versions of Twitter will look like, but from a very high-level standpoint. That could involve the continued integration of Twitter’s satellite application, Vine, and the soon-to-debut Twitter Music application, which has been in the works for some time.

Twitter CTO Adam Messinger

Messinger’s appointment also comes just months after Twitter appointed employees to two other key executive positions, naming long-time Pixar vet Ali Rowghani as company COO, while sliding former Zynga treasurer Mike Gupta into Twitter’s CFO seat. Rowghani used to hold the CFO position, but many have said that he has long been an influential, respected force inside Twitter, and that his move to COO could be seen as a shift in title to reflect the work he has long been doing already.

Twitter’s willingness to solidify its top brass — while charging headlong into the media and advertising world under the direction of global revenue president Adam Bain — looks more and more like a company gearing up for an initial public offering, which many speculate will occur some time in 2014.

VP of Product and Design Michael Sippey

But as I’ve long maintained, that configuration was far from successful. The design department has been a revolving door of exiting employees for the past six-odd months, and a number of the company’s updates to its application in the past have been clunky, counterintuitive or perhaps not as successful as drivers of growth and engagement as Twitter would have liked. It’s a tacit admission that Design just wasn’t meant to report to engineering.

Instead, Design will now report to product, a switch that essentially elevates Sippey to a much loftier position than before. One could see how the Design department would have dictated what product would look like in the future. But instead, Sippey is now charged with the last word in design decisions; essentially, a product guy driving design forward.

That’s even more important considering Twitter co-founder and design visionary Jack Dorsey is far from being involved in the day-to-day stuff of design. Now removed from Twitter and mostly consumed with Square, it’s a large vote of confidence in Sippey’s ability to lead product.

With the series of new appointments, I’d imagine the chatter over Twitter’s IPO and valuation won’t be settling down any time soon.

Lost in the sauce of the national work-from-home debate of last week that engulfed all things Yahoo, was a fascinating tidbit that several employees passed on to me from a recent Friday FYI meeting at its Silicon Valley HQ.

At the gathering, CEO Marissa Mayer talked briefly about the new telecommuting arrangements for some staffers, including the controversial new work-from-home memo that HR head Jackie Reses had issued that day.

But when Reses — who also wears another corporate hat as head of M&A at Yahoo — spoke she mentioned to the crowd that Yahoo was working on two “significant” acquisitions and about six smaller talent “acqhires.”

“It was kind of odd to telegraph it in such a big forum,” said one employee of Reses’ comments at the meeting in late February.

The revelation was unusual, to be sure, but perhaps not a surprise, given the recent run-up in Yahoo stock, its healthy cash position and, most of all, its need to add meaningful growth to the current efforts at turnaround.

And while some of its recent buys have been interesting and focused on improving its moribund mobile efforts, they have also been very small. And, as one high-ranking exec there told me, they “don’t move the needle in the way we need to in bringing in senior talent or loads of users or serious revenue.”

Indeed, while Yahoo shares have benefited greatly from the impressive performance by Alibaba Group in China, which is clearly on a roll, many think that showing actual improvement in its core business will be critical in the months ahead.

While making changes to Yahoo’s homepage and email, as well as cutting products, has been done, it is not yet clear what the impact is; the changes are aimed more at holding on to consumers rather than exciting them with new offerings.

Yahoo could also create its own new products to wow the masses, but that has been harder for it over the years. (Remember Livestand? Yeah, not so much.) In any case, an innovation infusion of such a large magnitude will take some time, given Mayer has to get the right people into place to do so.

Thus, a big purchase of an exciting new company with prominent leadership seems more likely than not and sooner than later. While Mayer has not articulated her vision for the new Yahoo in anything more than general ways, what she buys will say a lot.

Thus, sources said that Yahoo has been looking at a range of such acquisitions, in a number of categories such as advertising tech, mobile monetization and, of course, consumer “daily delight,” which is a phrase Mayer has used a lot.

It would be bold if Mayer went all out and made a mega-buy that would shake up the competitive landscape. My first choice for that is Pinterest, the scrapbooking phenom that was just valued at $2.5 billion in a new funding round. Mayer has also shown a lot of interest in blogging superstar Tumblr, while at both Google and Yahoo, as well as Foursquare, the well-known location app. Of course, there is also the troubled gaming giant, Zynga.

All are very pricey and would face rival interest, but such a move would be akin to Facebook’s billion-dollar blockbuster purchase of Instagram. Many now think that was prescient and cheap, given how important mobile photos are to the current digital ecosystem.

The list of possible big deals goes on: Hulu (which needs a tasty content element to make sense) as a video play; Millennial Media or Jumptap for mobile advertising; Quora for social answers; Flipboard for social media consumption; Rubicon or PubMatic, for ad targeting; and many more.

But all of those begin at the billion-dollar or more range and I have checked with a number of these and come up peanuts. Still, there are a whole lot of choices for Mayer and Yahoo in the $200 million to $500 million price range.

Here, Yahoo has the financial strength to make at least two of these significant purchases that Reses mentioned, as well as developing a much better reputation for Yahoo to keep real talent interested.

As one prominent startup exec, who had told me he never would consider selling to Yahoo in the past, said recently: “They are no longer complete losers, although Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon are still cooler.”

Hey, it’s a compliment, even if it’s a back-handed one, so it will be interesting to see who finds Yahoo cool enough.

Last week, I had a very erudite meeting with Louise Rogers, who runs one of the fastest growing social networking sites for educators — first in Britain and now operating in about 197 countries including the U.S.

The London-based TSL is a fascinating glimpse into how education is changing quickly online, catering to teachers who primarily share lesson plans, but also tips and techniques with others for free. It’s been signing up many thousands per month, who download 2.8 million plans weekly to help them better do their job — often in a resource-starved environment.

While running a number of English-language products, TSL struck a partnership called Share My Lesson with the American Federation of Teachers and its mainstay TES Connect service to expand here.

The company started a century ago as a newspaper supplement for teachers in the Times in Britain, which was owned by News Corp. at one point (which also owns this site) and was then sold to a private equity firm for $400 million and then sold again.

TSL, now largely online with $120 million in annual revenues garnered from a robust jobs listing service for teachers and other premium products, competes with other similar online services, like Curriki and LessonPlan.it.

Here is my video interview with Rogers about how it all works — listen and learn: