Unlike with Sarah Palin's emails, there's not really a public-spirited reason to post the screenshots the hackers took, except, of course, pure voyeurism. The detail-by-detail, appointment-by-appointment depiction of the lifestyle of a rich and famous actress is all engrossing stuff for the masses (and for us). And yet it feels oddly unsatisfying — the same drip, drip, drip of minutiae that the Internet famous overshare on blogs and Twitter.

Screenshots of the shayek@mac.com email account, released by habitués of the online bulletin board 4chan, appear to be authentic. Breaking into the account was a simple matter of knowing Hayek's birthday — September 2 — and guessing at her security word (they claim it was the name of her best known movie role) to reset the account's password. Public-records searches show that the 323-area-code phone number Hayek listed in a sent email belongs to the actress. A spokeswoman for Hayek has not returned a call requesting comment.

The glimpses into Hayek's life revealed by her inbox are fascinating, even if mundane: The stranger-suckling actress has been invited to America Ferreira's 25th birthday party. She downloads a bunch of iPhone applications from the iTunes App Store — and she gets spam from Apple, just like the rest of us. As for the perks of being famous, a driver was scheduled to meet her flight arriving in Abu Dhabi. American Express has given her a new Gold card. (What, she doesn't rate the exclusive black Centurion Card?) Balenciaga and Stella McCartney deliver designer clothes to her apartment. She schedules "Japanese face massages." And she gets scans of stories about her in the celebrity weeklies.

The show starts with Oprah excited about joining Twitter. (How adorable!) We know Oprah just got on Facebook a month ago and Twitter is all new to you. But how could you manage to hit "Refresh" rather than "Update" on your first tweet?

"Anyway, whatever!" she says. And that's why Oprah will win at the Twittersphere just like she does in all other media: It's her willingness to be exceptionally average, to get things wrong, to muddle along. Just like her millions of fans — the people who are probably hearing about Twitter for the first time today.

For some real amusement, check out Oprah sidekick Gayle King's Twitter feed. She complains about not being able to get her own name for her Twitter account, and manages to be even more inept at Twitter than her pal:

Ashton Kutcher plies Oprah with a lame explanation for his million-Twitter-follower race with CNN: It's not about a celebrity trying to feed his insatiable ego, it's about the "democratization of media."

Later in the show Oprah stumps Twitter CEO Ev Williams on how he can ferret out impostors on the service. "Our people know your people," is the best explanation he offers, and Oprah's pals don't buy it.

But who can be expected to do a good job as a one-man show in the swiftly professionalizing business of pretending to be an amateur? Even the gossips aren't doing the gossiping themselves. Even Perez Hilton is too busy hobnobbing with the people he ostensibly writes about to personally deface their photos anymore. It's understandable. Being yourself online is a full-time job. Ideally, for someone else.

The notion that blogs and Twitter will replace gossip has been around for a while. What's left for the tabloids if the stars reveal everything themselves? The gossip rags ought to fade away as celebrities interact with fans directly, and tell their stories their own way. Or so goes the webheads' theory.

But as Hollywood actors and musicians adopt Twitter en masse, the theory's getting a real-time test — and proving wanting. It turns out that media gatekeepers were really saving celebrities from themselves. As anyone who's written a magazine profile knows, what editors and readers want is an appealing, well-told story — not a numbing stream of trivia. And that means discarding far more material than one can ever use.

Facebook, Twitter blogs, and other media of the moment are a repository for that cutting-room floor — the ephemeral discards of mostly mundane lives. One man's trash is sometimes another man's treasure. But more often, it's just trash.

"It's inherently silly and it's inherently dumb," John Mayer, the musician and former Jennifer Aniston paramour told E! last week. Wise of Mayer to figure this out, though a bit late, since his Twitter addiction reportedly spurred his most recent breakup with Aniston. Mayer's smart enough to realize that Twitter is making him look like a fool to loved ones and strangers alike — but not smart enough to stop using it.

Courtney Love, meanwhile, is getting sued by a designer, Dawn Simorangkir, whose wares she once fancied, over ranting comments the professional Kurt Cobain widow left on MySpace and Twitter. Love has never been known for her self-control: Witness her unprovoked '90s-era rant about cheese, unleashed on an unsuspecting zine editor. But media which enable her to talk unfiltered 24/7 give us all too much insight into an obviously unbalanced mind.

Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton likewise have done themselves no favors in their blogging habits. Far from correcting their louche reputations, their overshares have cemented it.

Then there's the notion that fans would just sit back and receive all this information without comment. Jamie Spears, Britney's dad, is suing BreatheHeavy.com, a Britney Spears fan site, for allegedly invading his daughter's privacy. "I will destroy your ass!" Jamie Spears reportedly told BreatheHeavy webmaster Jordan Miller. (In fact, Jamie Spears may be mad about BreatheHeavy's aggressive questioning of the conservatorship arrangement under which he controls his daughter's finances.)

What's the solution? These people all need professional help. But since they're unlikely to spend the time they need on the psychiatrist's couch, they'll doubtless end up hiring assistants adept in social media. Ghostwritten Twitters are the hot new Hollywood must-have.

Every tweet will be media-coached. Every blog will be relentlessly edited — and then have typos inserted for authenticity. (Is that why someone pretending to be Rachael Ray consistently misspelled the cooking-show personality's name on a Yahoo blog?) The kids who are pretending to be celebrities on Twitter today will no doubt get paid to do it in the future.

Hilariously incompetent flack Jonathan Jaxson, who recently settled his legal spat with client Kim Zolciak of real Housewives of Atlanta, seems to be a pioneer here — in the sense that all pioneers get arrows in their back.

(Photo of Mayer by Getty Images; Spears by X17 Online)

Earlier today, we wondered whether Dina, the mother of Lindsay Lohan, was tweeting for real. The constant complaints about "haters" and deranged defenses of her daughter, not to mention the sheer volume sustained over the past two weeks, seemed nearly impossible to fake.

The key word being "nearly." Cherette, a relative newcomer to Twitter, seems to have quickly learned the potentials of this new storytelling medium. One thing the Lohan impostor quickly figured out: By pretending that Dina didn't get the service's 140-character limit on posts, he'd be able to draw a small army of enraged Twitter nerds eager to correct Lohan's gaffe.

According to our tipster, who says he's privy to some of Cherette's private postings on LiveJournal, Cherette has been posting comments crowing about his coup. Here are screenshots:

Assuming this prank doesn't have yet another layer to it, congratulations, Matt. You have endless opportunity ahead of you getting paid to pretend you're a celebrity.

Update: We just heard back from Cherette, who's admitted to the stunt and demonstrated that he controls the Twitter account. "What would you like to know?" he asks. Leave questions for him in the comments. Cherette also says he's the person who created Rosie O'Donnell's fake Twitter account.

Dawn Simorangkir, who operates the Boudoir Queen label, filed suit against Love on Thursday for "menacing and disturbing" statements she says Love made on Twitter and MySpace, seeking unspecified damages. Besides libel, the charges include invasion of privacy, infliction of emotional distress, breach of contract, and intentional interference with Simorangkir's business.

From the looks of Love's blog posts about Simorangkir, it looks like this was a love-hate relationship. Love called her a "genius" in November for her work on Etsy, an online handicrafts site. And then MySpace user Boudoir Queen gave Love "kudos" after she praised a design with "fucking ankle cuffs with fringe" as being "HOT" in December.

Things quickly soured. In January, Love posted a rambling entry on MySpace which said Simorangkir was charging "crazy money." And then Love accused her of theft on Twitter:

wwd. someone who will NEVER grace your pages the felonious Dawn/Boudoir Queen witnessed stealing 2 MASSIVE army bags out of the chat at 4am

After the news broke today, Love went on a crazy Twitter rampage and accused "Lohan and Kelly" — Lindsay Lohan and Kelly Ripa? — of stealing ADD drugs from her at a past Coachella music festival. (Love has feuded with Ripa before.)

Add to this debacle the litigious comments from reality-TV harlot Kim Kardashian, and Love looks to be in a whole heap of tweet trouble!

All we can say is: Keep up the tweets, Courtney! Things were so lonely when you swore off blogging last year.

(Photo by Getty Images)

Dina Lohan, Lindsay's mom, had a Twitter account registered on March 15, the same day accounts for Aliana "Ali" Lohan and Dakota "Cody" Lohan, Lindsay's little sister and brother, appeared. One possible reason for the coincidental timing: the leak of Lindsay Lohan's private messages posted on Twitter.

The Ali Lohan account is pursuing the usual fameball route of self-promotion, with tweets touting her music career. Cody Lohan's tweets consist mostly of messages for his mom and trash talk for his friends. Either might be reasonably easy to fake.

But Dina Lohan's messages are sui generis, a whole new kind of Twitter crazy the likes of which the world has never seen before.

For example: Lohan mère has still not figured out, two weeks in, that Twitter updates have a 140-character limit. She keeps accusing unseen forces of "censorship" — at one point, she speculated that Twitter was filtering messages with the word "Xanax" in them — and says she has contacted "tech support." It would be one thing if she were updating Twitter via cell phone, where it's easy to miss the limit. But most of her messages are posted from Twitter's website, which displays a counter showing exactly how many characters are left.

Then there's the tea. In an attempt to "relax," Twitter's Dina Lohan said she was drinking green tea. Green tea, of course, contains caffeine, which can cause nausea and jitters — the exact symptoms of which Lohan complains.

If Dina Lohan did not exist on Twitter, someone would have to invent her. It's comedy gold — but it seems like way too much work for someone to make up. What the Lohan family has proven, time and again, is that truth is stranger than fiction.

Update: Never underestimate the amount of free time on the Internet's hands. A bored LiveJournal user named Matt Cherette is taking credit for the Dina Lohan Twitter account.

50 Cent, né Curtis Jackson III, has hired a Web ghostwriter, Chris Romero, also known as Broadway, to post updates on the message-broadcasting service for him, the New York Times reports.

What we have here is a rapper with a stage name who relies on another guy with an extra moniker to represent his real, authentic self to fans. Is your head spinning yet?

Last week, Keith Olbermann ranted to thousands of MSNBC viewers that Twitter was the "worst person in the world" for allowing an unknown person to "perpetuate a fraud" by impersonating him on the service as "@keitholbermann." (On Twitter, users address each other with the "@" sign.)

The only problem: It turns out that an MSNBC employee had registered the account on Olbermann's behalf. Before the account's owner went private and deleted all of its updates, the @keitholbermann account seemed to be sending updates similar to the official Twitter feed for Olbermann's show, Countdown. Here's Olbermann's rant:

Then there's the curious case of Twitter's Christopher Walken, whose fake account has been disavowed by the actor — and yet is as real as it gets. The fakester's work is reminiscent of Dan Lyons's Fake Steve Jobs in its zany yet realistic insights into the inner life of a famous person. The clever impersonator, as yet anonymous, recently granted an interview to The Wrap. His explanation of his work as @cwalken:

I simply enjoy writing for voices other than my own. When I post a "cwalken" update I am hoping to write something as I would imagine it spoken by Christoper Walken. The politics, tastes and observations are my own. That is — I am not trying to speak for Christopher Walken. I am simply borrowing his voice and reworking my words in his cadence.

Some people crochet, I do this.

For some, pretending to be a celebrity on Twitter is a hobby. But for others, it's a business — like the small army of people Britney Spears employs. Until recently, Joseph Nejman was one of them. He's now dismissive of the practice:

"It's O.K. to tweet for a brand," he said, remarking how common it is for companies to have Twitter accounts, "but not O.K. for a celebrity. But the truth is, they are a brand. What they are to the public is not always what they are behind the curtain. If the manager knows that better than the star, then they should do it."

What Nejman does not mention: Spears's management operation fired him for incompetence in January, after the Harvard grad posted a clumsy help-wanted ad looking for a ghost Twitterer on his alma mater's alumni website. (In a major no-no for celebrity help-seekers, Nejman actually named Spears as the client in the ad, a move which Hollywood veterans scoffed at as likely to attract deranged fans instead of real talent.) Now that he's no longer being paid to pimp out Britney Spears on Twitter, Nejman doesn't think anyone should!

But in posing as a social-media expert instead of a fired hack, Nejman isn't doing anything worse than most people on Twitter, celebrity or not. A few are honest about their fakeness, like Technology Review editor-in-chief Jason Pontin, who wrote last August of his growing Twitter fixation:

But I will never use social technologies quite as the young use them, because I do not thrill to continuous attention and I value my privacy. Thus, the Jason Pontin who occupies the social space is a constructed persona, designed to be unchallengingly personable, humorous, and thoughtful. I am none of those things very often. The preoccupations of that Jason Pontin are professional: he thinks about emerging technologies all the time. And I never broadcast the substance of my inner life, because I know it would become insubstantial the moment I did.

Wall Street Journal editor Julia Angwin likewise recently figured out the point of Twitter: It is not about living your life with friends in real time. It is about promoting your work to gullible strangers.

That's the grand irony of Twitter: Even the real people on the service are fake. They are their own simulacra. No one actually lives their life 140 characters at a time. What we do is turn ourselves into works of fiction. Who's real? Who's not? Who cares?

Aniston, already a heroic grocery-newsstand everywoman for her martyrdom at the hands of a boyfriend-stealing Angelina Jolie, has spoken out on behalf of Twitter widows everywhere. Friends of Aniston told Star that the last straw was when he claimed to be busy working, yet posted messages constantly on Twitter. Says this tabloid-quoted "friend":

Jen was fuming. There he was, telling her he didn't have time for her and yet his page was filled with Twitter updates. Every few hours, sometimes minutes, he'd update with some stupid line. And in her mind, she was like "He has time for all this Twittering, but he can't send me a text, an email, make a call?"

On the bright side, Mayer has permission to approach Shaq, a fellow citizen of Twitteronia, at any moment.

(Photo via E Online)

The tip came from a Jason Felts at Edge Productions. Edge is the PR firm of Jonathan Jaxson, the wacky publicist whose stunt with leaked nudie pics got a client, Disney star Adrienne Bailon, booted from Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. In a now-deleted post archived on The Insider, Jaxson crowed about signing Zolciak as a client.

It figures that anyone stupid enough to hire Jaxson as a flack would also be too stupid to operate her own blog. Kim Zolciak Online is hosted on Blogger, Google's free, Web-based blogging service. Either that, or she just really doesn't like blogs — even her own. From an interview with Paper last fall:

How are the blogs treating you these days?
I try to stay away from them. Initially they were great, and they just got worse and worse. I don't think people can see who you are from seven episodes that are one hour each.

Phoenix blogger Jesse Bearden was debating with a friend whether Shaq's "Real Shaq" Twitter account was real. When they saw Shaq post an update that he was headed to the 5 & Diner, they drove off to see if the Real Shaq was there. He was. Bearden and his friend hesitated before approaching him. Then Shaq tweeted that he sensed Twitterers in his midst. They said hello, took photos, and compared cell phones. (Shaq has a Googlephone.)

And then the Real Shaq posted a chiding note to Twitter:

To all twitterers , if u c me n public come say hi, we r not the same we r from twitteronia, we connect

Ah, Twitteronia, that strange land where dwell the Twitterati, speaking their own twange twongue. With 6 million users, how long will this feeling of a private club remain? And will Shaq come to regret his invite when true stalkers discover how easy it is to register for an account, and he discovers that real life doesn't have a "block" feature like Twitter does?

Assuming, that is, that "time for bed, it's a school night!" is a joke about Kutcher's relative youth. Points to Moore, also, for the dorky old picture of herself.

Notice, below, that Moore is already using the microblogging service to connect with a range of new and interesting people. Like her stylist.

Hilton is actually the victim here, researchers at ScanSafe believe; her website was infiltrated, with code added to its pages which redirects visitors to another website which downloads "malware," the catchall term for hacker-written code like viruses, that then tries to obtain login information to their online-banking accounts. Out-of-date Web software on Hilton's site appears to be to blame.

Why Hilton? Famous for being famous, she's also hacked because she's famous. Her online audience is a rich target. And that tells us something about the changing nature of computer criminals. In 2005, a group of hackers penetrated Hilton's Sidekick and posted her contact list, apparently for kicks. Now, four years later, it's all about the money, as they seek to crack bank accounts, not Fred Durst's cell-phone number. Like Hilton herself, hackers have become expert at converting fame into cash.

Lauren Kozak is Spears' "social media manager" who wrote most of the updates to the Britney Twitter feed before the hacking attack. She apologized in our comments after the incident, but Britney's Twitter has been almost completely silent since. The most recent message came from Larry Rudolph, Spears's manager. Curiously, Kozak herself has posted to Twitter recently. And Spears is advertising for a new social media manager.

But! We hear from a source that after the job listing went up, Kozak has said she's still on the job. And that the person who was actually fired was her boss. Which is where this really gets interesting: The contact listed on the job posting is Joseph Nejman — presumably the boss Kozak mentioned getting fired. Nejman, according to his LinkedIn profile, currently works at Google. But he previously founded JJ Chill, a Venice, Calif. fast-food joint, with Jamie Spears, Britney's father, with whom she's had contentious relations, both business and personal.

A baroque split in the Britney camp over a Twitter-hacking incident? On the Internet, all things seem possible.

Well, yes, in fact — everyone who doesn't click on crazy emails that claim to be from Twitter but aren't. Twitter is the latest target of a "phishing" campaign — an attempt by hackers to gather usernames and passwords through deceptive means.

Typically, the victim receives an email that directs them to a website where they're asked to log in. The website is controlled by hackers who then use the credentials to take over an account. In Spears's case, the anonymous troublemakers on 4chan's /b/ bulletin board are claiming credit.

Just one question: Why would the b-tards bother? Online banking accounts have long been a target of phishers, since there's money to be made. But there's no money in Twitter. The service, which lets users post short updates to their friends, doesn't carry advertising, and hasn't figured out a way to charge people. Like Twitter itself, this hacking stunt is good entertainment, but not a clever business.

Seen a high-profile Twitter account hacked? Send it in. We'll keep a running list.

HACKED:

Fox News

Britney Spears

Rick Sanchez, CNN anchor:

Barack Obama:

Facebook:

The Huffington Post:

Black isn't sure why Facebook disabled his account, but he's mad as hell:

How am I supposed to maintain my vast terrorist network without this social networking site?

While it’s true that I never poke, nor poke back, I think I’ve been a loyal and true Facebook friend. I always accept friendship requests, right up to the bullshit 5,000 friend limit. Facebook, is it my fault that more than 5,000 people want to feel my love? No, it is not. It is the fault of my genetically superior brain and startling good looks. If you’re going to start discriminating against gorgeous geniuses, then I don’t even know what.

How am I supposed to receive invitations to events to which I have no interest in attending? How am I supposed to keep up with what various high school students I have never met are doing? How am I supposed to install and then uninstall various applications because they are annoying? Facebook, don’t you realize that these activities take up most of my waking hours?

But maybe this unlikely pair should kiss and make up. Black, a clever sort, has been stuck doing basic-cable schlock like VH1's "I Love the '70s/'80s/'90s" series and Comedy Central's Reality Bites Back. Pets.com folded after figuring out that spending millions of dollars on TV advertisements and paying for express shipping on bags of cat food did not make business sense. We're not saying Facebook's economic model is quite that bad. But Black would make a better spokesman than Mark Zuckerberg, the social network's hopelessly tongue-tied CEO.

(Photo by Del Far)

The dotcom heiress is best known for being Lindsay Lohan's first same-sex fling, before the actress hooked up with Sam Ronson and Semel moved on to Tequila. (She's also got a violent streak, and swears like a venture capitalist!) She showed up at a Los Angeles Borders for a book signing to promote Hooking Up With Tila Tequila. (With that title, shouldn't Semel herself have been the author?)

Socialite Life has a clip that's sure to leave you diabetic. "She's not here to beat up any fans," Tequila explains. "I'm just here to get my book signed," says Semel. Then they coo and hug and kiss, all for the cameras. Interviewed alone, Semel says she attended the event "to support my girlfriend" and that "she couldn't put the book down, for somebody with, like, major ADD problems ..." ADD problems? It's a mystery why her dad never got her a job at Yahoo. She would have fit right in.

1. Nintendo Wii – 2,056,866 related items sold
2. Xbox 360 – 1,297,903 related items sold
3. Apple’s iPod Touch – 281,361 related items sold
4. Hannah Montana – 223,139 related items sold
5. Apple’s iPhone 3G – 212,837 related items sold
6. Brett Favre – 199,832 related items sold
7. Barack Obama – 111,546 related items sold
8. High School Musical Cast – 109,813 related items sold
9. Guitar Hero III – 98,159 related items sold
10. Madonna – 96,511 related items sold

The list is not scientific; eBay's so-called pop-culture expert, Karen Bard, picked these items from the raw data, discarding prosaic categories in the interest of making eBay's discard racks look a bit more exciting. ("Bard’s picks were culled from items sold pertaining to pop culture phenomena in categories ranging from political scandals to blockbuster blowouts to tech toys.")

But think about why things land on eBay: They're mostly used goods or closeouts, the outcome of a purchase now regretted. That's why the iPod Touch, an intentionally crippled iPhone that does everything but make phone calls, outsells the iPhone 3G on eBay. Once people figured out what it was good for, they no longer wanted it. The same could be said for Madonna.

(Random celebrity image provided by eBay. Seriously, they included this in the press release.)

Here's why I think it's really the actor. It's not the autobiographical details, like a love for Austin or Blue Moon beer, which any pretender could have looked up online. It's the sheer ordinariness of Wilson's Twitter feed which feels real:

Of note:

• The account was sporadically used in April and May, then went all but silent until November. A classic adoption pattern of real Twitter users.
• A faker would publish a fantasy version of Wilson's life via Twitter. Instead, the "tweets" — Twitter messages — are relentlessly mundane, discussing beer and replying to other Twitter users. Most real tweets consist of banter with other users rather than actual information.
• The most recent message notes that Wilson has installed software to help him use Twitter better. He has not tweeted since then. Again, classic Twitter!

Gossip column Page Six spotted Tequila "hooking up" with Justin Long, best known for his role as a Mac in Apple commercials, at a Vegas nightclub on Halloween. Will the Mac preference stick? Who knows, but according the a New York Post spy, Long reportedly "asked her [Tequila] to straddle him while making out." What would John Hodgman have to say about this? (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images for Cirque du Soleil)