In a memo first published by Silicon Alley Insider, newish sales boss Nikesh Arora says he hasn’t found a successor for Fischer and will step into his shoes in the meantime.

There has been a steady stream of Googlers heading out of the company’s sales group. But while Fischer isn’t technically leaving, his move is still a big one: He was a well-regarded executive in a high-profile spot, formerly occupied by Sheryl Sandberg, who is now Facebook’s COO.

In a post from co-founder Biz Stone, the company counsels users that, with the exception of a single account, none of their personal information seems to have been exposed as a result of the hack. But before establishing that, Stone goes out of his way to explain that Twitter’s security problems are Twitter’s security problems, not cloud computing’s security problems or Google’s (GOOG) security problems.

This attack had nothing to do with any vulnerability in Google Apps which we continue to use. This is more about Twitter being in enough of a spotlight that folks who work here can become targets. In fact, around the same time, Evan’s wife’s personal email was hacked and from there, the hacker was able to gain access to some of Evan’s personal accounts such as Amazon and PayPal but not email. This isn’t about any flaw in web apps, it speaks to the importance of following good personal security guidelines such as choosing strong passwords.

That last line seems directed at the likes of analysts like yours truly, who suggested this morning that the hack would raise concerns about the security of services that place work data on shared servers accessed via the Web. (Though the Twitter guys did seem to like my underwear-drawer metaphor. Cool!)

Stone then goes on to rattle a sword, gently but pointedly, at Web sites that have published stuff pilfered by the hacker.

We are in touch with our legal counsel about what this theft means for Twitter, the hacker, and anyone who accepts and subsequently shares or publishes these stolen documents. We’re not sure yet exactly what the implications are for folks who choose to get involved at this point but when we learn more and are able to share more, we will.

Note that while it’s easy enough to find this stuff on the Web, only a handful of mainstream Web sites, including TechCrunch, Gawker and Silicon Alley Insider, have published it, and most of what they have published is banal. I’ve asked all three sites for a response to Twitter’s response.

In the meantime, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington, who has promised to publish more, announces in a new post that he is in the midst of “negotiations” with Twitter’s lawyers about his plans. Happy to hear from a First Amendment specialist, but I don’t think Twitter has a case against Web publishers here; the issue is an ethical one, not a legal one.

UPDATE: Here’s Gawker Editor-in-Chief Gabriel Snyder’s “bring it on” retort:

It’s hilarious to see Twitter, which has become a conduit for real-time, unauthorized information from places like the New York Times’ internal meetings, now get prissy about corporate privacy. Ev Williams seems to have learned a lot about the mores of the institutional elite during his stay in Sun Valley. As for Twitter coming after us for publishing the docs, the only thing I’m upset about is that the leaker didn’t come to us with them first.

No, not really.

While an earlier version of the story went on to include a graph depicting BloodCopy’s Web traffic and several theories that might explain Gawker Media’s purchase of a vampire-themed blog, the Alley Insider post has since been revised. It now explains that the news site was snookered by a “PR firm contracted by Gawker [that] sent us a release with the news.”

Said news is actually part of a promotional campaign for “True Blood,” the vampire show entering its second season on Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO .

More details about BloodCopy, the fake blog that HBO runs to promote the show, as well as other marketing stunts the cable network has rolled out, are available here. But if you don’t have time to read a whole blog post, do be aware that this anti-vampire rights group is a fake. So is this pro-vampire rights group. And so is this synthetic blood beverage.

Disclosures! I used to work for Alley Insider, whose parent company just raised a bunch of money, which makes me happy.

The Times is still struggling to figure out how to adapt its business model to the Web era. But it seems to have have embarked on a campaign against after sites that lift too much of its content–a strategy that chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. alluded to in a speech last week.

The Times has already had reached out to aggregators Newser, the Huffington Post and Silicon Alley Insider to complain about various incidents. In the case of Newser, it sent a boilerplate letter threatening legal action.

The latest example: Apartment Therapy, a New York-based design/consumption blog network, says the paper has sent it a takedown notice, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, demanding that the site remove “all the pictures we’ve blogged from them in 2009.”

In a post, co-founder Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan complains that the Times doesn’t understand that his sites reprint the paper’s photos because they think they’re great.

“We’ll fully admit to loving their pictures, but we’ve been very conscious to never take too much from them, only blogging a visual “taste” of an article and then pushing readers to get the rest on their site. In other words, our editorial policy has been to quote, not appropriate, just like we were all taught in high school.”

Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis declined to comment.

I can already hear the blogosphere getting ready to denounce the paper for “not getting” the “culture” of the Web, where everybody reposts everyone else’s work, and everyone in the “link-based economy” benefits. But like the Newser incident earlier this year, this one seems pretty clear: The paper doesn’t want other people–or at least commercial sites–using its photos without permission.

Tim Armstrong was considered a star inside and outside of Google, and his former company worked hard to keep the sales executive on the reservation.

But now that’s he’s bolted for Time Warner (TWX), who will replace him?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has already promised to name a successor “in the coming weeks,” and he’s narrowed the field by declaring it will be an internal candidate.

Who might that be? 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 (pictured), the former Doubleclick CEO, who now runs Google’s display business.

A sampling of the responses: “The only choice,” “I would assume they will work hard on Rosenblatt, who may not do it,” “Shoe-in,” etc.

The flip side of the conventional wisdom is that Rosenblatt, who came aboard a year ago when Google (GOOG) completed its $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick, may be leaving, and will leave if he doesn’t get Armstrong’s job.

For more Rosenblatt testimonials, consult this Silicon Alley Insider article, where the blog’s readers anointed the executive as the best choice to run Yahoo (YHOO).

But what if Schmidt, like Yahoo’s board, decides to ignore the Rosenblatt fan club?

My respondents have plenty of other suggestions. And unlike Rosenblatt, most of these other would-be candidates were brought on by Armstrong, which may or may not count for something. In no particular order:

Jeff Levick, VP, industry development & marketing, the Americas. Googler since 2001.

Tom Phillips, director of search and analytics; former head of Doubleclick integration; former head of Google print ads. Googler since 2006.

Eileen Naughton, director, media platforms; former head of East Coast sales. Googler since 2007.

Penry Price, VP, North American ad sales. Googler since 2004.

David Fischer, VP, global online sales. Googler since 2002.

Nikesh Arora, president, European, Middle East and African markets. Googler since 2004.

Joan Braddi, VP search services. Googler since 2000.

All right, readers–your turn to weigh in. Who do you want filling Armstrong’s large shoes? And who do you think Google will actually pick?

If you feel strongly enough to register using your real name, please leave a comment below. If you want to do this sotto voce, you can reach me directly at peter@allthingsd.com.

And if you want to be completely anonymous, which is understandable but less useful to me (I won’t have any way of reaching you for follow-up), you can use the blind tip box here. I’ll update this post or craft a new one as I gather more string.

Second thing: I learned this via Twitter this afternoon, via fellow Twitterer Dave Martin, who was “re-tweeting” information he’d picked up via the Chicago CBS TV station’s Twitter account, which was passing along information it had received from CBS News.

Similarly, I am learning, via Twitter, that this amazing picture from Twitterer Janis Krums, who posted it to Twitpic, is the “first” photo of the airplane in the water. No idea if that’s true–was someone monitoring all news outlets simultaneously before they reached this conclusion?–but it is an extraordinary photo.

In the old days, this image might have taken hours or even days to make it to cable news–think of those terrible videos that people shot with their home cameras during the first few minutes of 9/11. Today Krums was being interviewed on MSNBC 34 minutes after he posted the photo, says Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider.

So: Did Twitter “break” news today? Did “citizen journalists” really ”beat” the bad-old MSM? It’d be great if we could skip that debate. Because it will be as boring as the one we had last month after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

So let’s get it over with quickly: I learned that there was a plane in the water via Twitter, via a whole lot of people who live and work on the west side of Manhattan. But the people who told me what had happened after that, and the ones who are telling me why the plane ended up in the water in the first place–those are people who have full-time jobs as journalists. Like the six people who contributed to this excellent report for the New York Times (NYT) Web site.

So I plan on relying on those folks for my news for as long as there’s a business to support them. But I’ll be using Twitter and the Web to augment that coverage–to tell me something very quickly, or to pass along news gleaned from news reports in the first place. See? Easy. Now I’m going to listen to WNYC, the local NPR station, which has been going wall-to-wall with this story all afternoon.

One rumor that has yet to materialize, though: A cheap version of the phone priced at $99. Instead, Wal-Mart (WMT) will sell the phones at about the same price that everyone else does–the black 8GB iPhone 3G model will go for $197 and the 16GB black or white model will be at $297.

What will this do for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone sales? Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider does the math:

If each Wal-Mart store gets an average 200 iPhones as inventory, that’s 500,000 iPhone shipments Apple can recognize this quarter. Even if each store gets an average 100 iPhones, that will nicely pad this quarter’s numbers. (And if for some reason Apple waits until next quarter to recognize the shipments, they’ll help during a seasonally slow March quarter.)”

A year ago, the conventional wisdom said that the online advertising market would still grow in an economic slump because online ads were cheaper and more effective.

And they are. But if the slump is big enough– like the one we’re in now–then all bets are off.

Which is why there’s no longer any conventional wisdom about the future of online ads. Two data points, and one anecdote:

• J.P. Morgan (JPM) Internet analyst Imran Khan has reduced his projections for ad growth for the second time since September. But he’s still projecting growth. In fact, Khan sees overall spending, fueled by search ads on Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO), growing 13 percent in 2009, down from a previous projection of 19 percent. But he thinks display ads will fare much worse, noting U.S. spending on display will only grow six percent in 2009, down from his earlier forecast of 16 percent.
• Ad network optimizer The Rubicon Project reports that the average price for an online ad at “thousands of sites and 270 ad networks” dropped 11 percent in the last quarter. But since it can also find evidence of prices increasing at some sites–news and reference sites, for instance, increased prices 36 percent–Rubicon argues that things aren’t so bad after all.
• Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton thinks everyone who doesn’t see misery next year is delusional, period. The man behind sites like Gawker, Gizmodo and Valleywag happily offered this insight at the Silicon Alley Insider/Founder’s Club event last week, which was packed with digital movers and shakers. All of them should be terrified, he said, charmingly: “Anyone who isn’t prepared for ads to go down 40 percent is crazy.” Obligatory disclaimer here: Denton is always seeing doom just around the corner. But he’s very convincing.

Want a (slightly) more upbeat spin? Here’s Khan’s executive summary:

* Overall ad budgets continue to weaken. Since we reduced our estimates on September 4th, we have seen a further slowdown in the economy, particularly in the last two weeks of the third quarter. Weakness continued into October and spread from the US and UK throughout continental Europe and Asia. Additionally, dollar strength was greater than expected which will further depress growth rates. We are now basing estimates on a $1.25 exchange rate vs. our prior base of $1.40. Our updated model calls for total online global advertising growth of 25% in F’08 and 13% in F’09 vs. our prior estimates of 28% and 19% Y/Y growth respectively.

* Deterioration of display advertising is more pronounced than expected. Our channel checks are showing that sell-through is declining. Additionally, so far CPMs for premium inventory are flat to slightly down. Looking forward, we think CPMs will remain depressed and sell-through rates will worsen.  As a result, we are lowering our F’08 and F’09 domestic display estimates to $7.95B (11 percent Y/Y growth) and $8.45B (6% growth) from $8.15B (14% Y/Y growth) and $9.43B (16 percent growth). We are now modeling F’08 global display ad growth of 14% Y/Y vs. our prior estimate of 16% growth.

* Search performance held up in 3Q but we expect ad budget cuts to bleed through. We continue to see performance-based advertising holding up better than banner advertising. Long tail advertisers continue to allocate additional dollars to search. However, keyword price inflation is moderating. Additionally, we think marketing spend pullback in some segments including travel, telecom, autos, and retail is worsening. As such, we are lowering our domestic F’08 and F’09 search growth estimates to 23.4% Y/Y and 17.3%, respectively, from 27.4% and 25.5% Y/Y growth. We are modeling F’08 global search ad growth of 34% vs. our prior estimate of 36% Y/Y growth.”