Subject: TOM CRUISE?
To: tips@gawker.com
I'm the wife of a united states soldier. I have watched T. Cruise for some time now .I'm no Dr. so someone should tell Katie,run,run as fast as you can.T.Crui se needs to be in Afghanistan under my husband.He would either come down to this earth or Ft.levenwort.hI thank you so much for putting this out.
Business research firm Basex reports that "unnecessary interruptions" will cost businesses $650 billion next year. Excuse me. My boss is IMing me with a YouTube video I apparently need to watch. Where was I? Basex analyst Jonathan Spira gave Bits a pledge for all of us to take, so we can avoid being part of the problem. What? Not now, Jordan, I'm posting!
Poor undercover cop-assaulting hottie TV anchor Alycia Lane has had her good albeit probably fake name dragged through the mud before. Back in May, as we mentioned earlier, she made Page Six for an embarrassing "emailing bikini photos of herself to Rich Eisen's wife" snafu, the sort of thing that could happen to any of us. When that story broke, a Gawker Operative got in touch with Ms. Lane to express her general distaste for the whole situation. Our emailer explains: "When I read the original page 6 article in May I was PMSing and proceeded to look up Alycia Lanes email address thru the network. I sent her a snotty email and she responded. I almost felt bad but now not so much. I copied and pasted the emails below. Get some kleenex." Yes. You'll need it. Alycia's side of the sad tale, after the jump.
Founder Ben Lerer tells us Thrillist will announce a Las Vegas version of its email guide to restaurants, bars and culture tomorrow. 'Cause you were so worried you'd find nothing to do on your next Sin City business trip, right? Mock the idea if you like (and we do), but you've got to admire former AOL Time Warner COO Bob Pittman's choice in Web investments. Thrillist does nothing but grow. Subscribers are up 500 percent to nearly 300,000 so far this year.
In the wake of its Beacon fiasco, Facebook has launched a new blogger appeasement campaign — starting with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington. His early Christmas gift? Facebook notifications now carry the entire text of messages sent via the social network. Arrington says this will have a "big impact." Yes, in the sense that it might get him to shut up about Facebook's privacy violations. [TechCrunch]
Google, the world's most wonderful or evil company, has greylisted popular web host company Dreamhost, even while it claims that levels of spam are dropping overall. (Dreamhost is a ten-year-old company that hosts more than half a million websites on more than 1500 servers.) The greylist (which means that mail sent through Dreamhost to Gmail is delayed by hours or days while it is assessed for mass-spamming) was imposed more than two weeks ago by Gmail; it was triggered because so many Dreamhost users forward their mail to Gmail, which made Dreamhost look like a spammer. Dreamhost announced the problem on November 17, and has talked with Google support, and yet it's still not resolved. This seems like evidence that Google's infrastructure has major trouble—how is it possible that it takes more than two weeks to remove a legitimate source of mail from a greylist?
That's what's happening to me. Maybe someone figured out my password, or maybe it's a technical glitch, but my Google password has been changed. I joined Gmail in college, so I used a school address as my secondary address. Years later, I finally need that password-reset email but the address is long dead. And Google's policy is to make me WAIT FIVE DAYS while someone could be wreaking havoc on my life before I can answer my security question and get my email back.
In response to word that Yahoo and Google want to use their email services to compete with social networks, Fred Wilson tried to compare the "social graphs" of popular Web email services against popular social networks, but he couldn't get it all on one chart. Here's our chart, courtesy of ComScore. It shows the outlook for Google and Yahoo is good, if they manage to turn their email user base into a workable social graph, whatever that means.
You've seen the chart: Web email isn't necessarily going away, but social network messaging is on the rise. In the U.K., it's already as popular as email. So what's Yahoo's plan to compete with Facebook and other social networks? Email, of course. Seems that's Google's plan too, according to what both companies told Bits. The idea is that the connection between you and those in your address books and inboxes are just as much a part of your social graph as the people you "friend" on Facebook. But I'm skeptical. Who wants a friend request from Mr. George Annah of Senegal or opheliasbmv4 and other "chicks in your area" who "needu some luvin today" ?
You know your privacy is an illusion — especially if you're a Facebook member — but maybe you need a reminder? Leave it to Mark Rasch, the former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit . In a recent editorial for the Telegraph he makes it clear: Want to buy some pot from your friend? Don't seal the deal over email.
When Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook, we told you the real losers were AOL and Yahoo, because they depend on email usage to drive traffic through their portals. Email is dying as a form of communication, we said, but some smartass commenter didn't believe us. He wanted to see some numbers. Fine. Here are some numbers from Hitwise.
Wired editor Chris Anderson has finally had it up to here. He just published the long list of everyone who's been banned from his inbox—mostly publicists—in the last month. (One of the people he banned works for the Department of Commerce, but hey!) Total dick or total genius? You decide. Also, he only gets 300 emails a day. Ha! Oh, baby. Come over some day and I'll show you my inbox. [The Long Tail]
A tipster writes:
Meet Chad White. Chad's a man on a mission, a crazy dreamer who knows that if you work hard and apply some pressure, your goal can come to fruition. Chad longs for a better world: A world in which we stop referring to electronic communiqués as "e-mail." As Chad so eloquently puts it, "It's now time for the word to take its final step and become simply "email," severing its antiquated 19th-century association with mail delivered by people in blue uniforms—and signifying the ubiquity of this form of communication." A noble aspiration. But how to make it happen? Harness the power of marketing!
NICK DOUGLAS — "If you've sent me an email (and you aren't my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again." So says Fred Wilson, venture capitalist, declaring e-mail bankruptcy today on his blog. He's not the first high-profile person to take this measure. Here are three other notables who've given up on their e-mail (the most famous of whom reportedly white-lied) and three who found a better way.
If you're the type of person who's reading a website like this, there's a good chance you've already gotten an email forwarded to you explaining that the true father of Suri Cruise is actually Chris Klein. According to the email, which we've now had the pleasure of receiving 23 times (but please, don't stop!), the real story is that Katie Holmes was knocked up when the two broke their engagement, and so she quickly took Tom Cruise up on his "be my beard" deal. They acted like press-hungry idiots so everyone would believe they were so insane — er, in love — as to have a baby right away. Cruise gets his cover, Suri's not a bastard, and Katie doesn't look like a ho. The end.
Oh, you think your life is tough? Maybe it is. But it's nothing compared with the challenges faced by Times Feed Me columnist Alex Witchel, also known as Mrs. Frank Rich. Today she reveals the exquisite misery of attending a charity dinner with mediocre food, being seated next to an unnamed Hollywood Big School, and, when the entrees arrived — apparently "the accepted moment to switch conversational partners, no matter how much fun you're having" — turning to start her convo with the big shot and discovering that he was instead focused on his BlackBerry. The horror! (After the "accepted moment," it seems, it is unacceptable to turn back to the previous, more interesting, conversational partner.) After 750 words on Witchel's horrible terrible no-good very bad travesty of an evening, we're amazed she's able to get out of bed in the morning.
There's an interesting piece in today's Los Angeles Times revealing that the FBI is investigating an L.A. paparazzi agency at the behest of Us Weekly. Seems the agency was founded last year by a former Us staffer, Jill Ishkanian, and the mag had become suspicious that Ishkanian was gaining access to its reporting scoops for her own gain. The FBI executed search warrants at Ishkanian's home and office, and the working theory was that she was somehow tapping into the Us Weekly computer system to conduct this industrial espionage. What does Ishkanian's lawyer have to say to all this? Oh yeah, he says, she was in the email system. Yikes! And how did she crack the intense security measures? By using a password she'd been given, which no one ever bothered to change.
