Behold, a holiday miracle: Democrats and Republicans can be agree! Donald Trump, a man as unifying as he is orange, has given us all a reason to get along.
Sometimes it's nice to see an old acquaintance doing well, and sometimes it's upsetting and you're thinking, I hope she loses all her hair, but then you realize people will think you're mean, so you smile and say, Oh, I'm so thrilled for her. Paris Hilton definitely did one of these things recently.
Odds are, at some point in your life you will have to break bread with someone you don't like.
What is Pakistan doing with the $2 billion in military aid we gave it last year, and the additional $2 billion we'll be spending on it over the next five years? Oh, just arresting people who helped the CIA kill Osama bin Laden, like the soldier who secretly recorded the license plate numbers of cars entering his Abbottabad compound. I guess we need to give them more money.
Coupon company Eversave surveyed 400 women about their Facebook friends. 83% of respondents admitted to being annoyed with friends' Facebook presences. 63% of women said their friends "complain all the time." 41% hated their friends' political views, and 32% were sick of their stupid perfect friends bragging about stupid perfect lives.
Though we have recently been ensconced in a blissful, months-long "No Tucker Max News to Report" period, it appears that our peace shall soon be shattered: our "favorite" "person" (Tucker Max) has a new book coming out. With words!
On the Today show this morning, Meredith genially asked weatherman Al Roker, who is black, if he knew about the weather in Africa. Because her kid's going there! Al, though, took jokey offense, and the scene got pretty uncomfortable
"Ugly and Dirty... that's all..." someone named "Nahant" wrote on the CityFile profile for a one Peter Davis, the "social queen," fashion writer, and Tinsley Mortimer friend. We think that "Nahant" might be our favorite socialgay Kristian Laliberte (surprise!), who used to date Davis and grew up in the "magical" resort town of Nahant, Massachusetts.
Facebook added a feature today which allows you to classify your friends. You know, one group is for the friends you like, another for the people you have to pretend to like. Some are calling the feature a LinkedIn killer, since you can now set apart work pals from personal connections. We're not so sure. So far, you can't set privacy settings for an entire group, or limit how often its members appear in your news feed. What's the point?
Explaining why Facebook does not make him as paranoid as Google, science fiction writer Cory Doctorow says frenemies will doom the social network: "Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.... That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go — and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history."
We now know the identity of "Ted," the no-longer mysterious force behind VC ratings site TheFunded.com. He's Adeo Ressi, who cofounded Total New York, an early Web city guide, back in 1994. But where did his "Ted" nickname come from? Ressi revealed to Valleywag that his early users, a group which may have included FuckedCompany founder Philip Kaplan, dubbed him "Ted" to annoy him, since that was the name of Ressi's supposed "nemesis." Now that we know who Ressi is, there's one obvious candidate: Total New York cofounder Ted Werth.
WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — "I'm happy to say I'll have a job for the next two years," says Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, on stage with conference organizer John Battelle and his boss, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, confirming widespread rumors that he and MySpace cohort Tom Anderson had renewed their contract to run the social network for another two years. "I had to go from the nickel-and-dime newspaper culture, to the magazine culture ... to Hollywood and the Internet culture," says Murdoch, nodding to the reported — but unconfirmed — figure that DeWolfe and Anderson would make: $30 million over two years. More live coverage, after the jump.
Facebook has a severe flaw besides the ease with which it lets you befriend wannabe stalkers: There's no way to flaunt your equally long list of enemies. What to do with those annoying, despicable jackanapes who demand a wholly undeserved friending? Better than ignoring the request is using MIT student Kevin Matulef's temporary fix. His Facebook app Enemybook allows you to publicly rank and humiliate your sworn enemies. Inevitably, Facebook will turn this into a site feature, but until then, Matulef's app is the way to go.
As rumors grow that social network Facebook will introduce its own payment system, News Corp.-owned MySpace, still the leading social network, is teaming up with PayPal, eBay's online payments division. The partnership amounts to an experiment at this point, focusing on donations to political campaigns and nonprofits — not exactly a hotbed of MySpace activity. Wake us when you can buy concert tickets on MySpace. But the move does speak to the partners' fears that Facebook will introduce its own payment system. How to respond? Become frenemies, of course. MySpace instantly has a proven payment system without months or years of development, and PayPal gains access to MySpace's millions of users. Nothing builds partnerships faster than fear of the competition.
