Christmas almost came early this year for Mashable's Ben Parr. Ben, you've got to tell us who this was. Pay the gift forward.

And dysfunctional family recriminations came early this holiday season for recently departed Wall Street Journal reporter Rebecca Dana.

Listen people, when you see Matt Cutts of Google — yes, that Matt Cuts — in the supermarket, or maybe at Cannes, or just straight bathing in groupie adulation by the pool, remember to just be cool, like it's not a huge emotional deal for you. Resist the urge to take his picture and sell it for six figures to OK!.

Somewhere in this tweet, about a no-doubt fascinating conversation between a woman blessed by genetics and familial luck into a lifetime of opulent wealth, and a rapper who overcame a childhood in the ghetto and repeated music industry swindles by dint of sheer hard work, determination and musical aptitude — somewhere in that exchange at a record executive's holiday party is a full book, if not a movie. Just try and imagine how this might have gone, dialog wise.

It takes literally decades to work up to a passively braggy tweet of this caliber. Watch Arianna and learn.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Steve Krakauer of Mediaite marveled that someone spelled the name of his website wrong. We marvel when anyone manages to spell it right.

UPDATE: The original version of this post mis-spelled Steve Krakauer's name.

The New Yorker's Susan Orlean announced her marriage to Mashable's Pete Cashmore, who will presumably elevate her above her past work as a part-time farmhand.

This is why TheFrisky's Jessica Wakeman can't have nice things.

Tila Tequila welcomes a conversation with your child, however prurient.

Paris Hilton is just fulfilling her moral obligation to entertain you, people. One does not question life advice from Marilyn Monroe. Especially when everything turned out so well for her.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Lavandeira has won a case against PerezRevenge, a gossip site which styles itself as an antidote to Hilton's "meanness." U.S. District Court Judge Gary Feess has ordered the blog's owners, Margie Rogers and Elizabeth Silver-Fagan, to stop using the PerezRevenge name, turn over the site to Hilton, and desist from "using the term 'Perez' to designate any platform, medium, and/or website that contains entertainment or celebrity news or gossip."

Which is laughable, when you think about how Hilton got his start. He first blogged on a site called PageSixSixSix, until he got a nastygram from the New York Post, which objected to his free-riding on the name of its famous gossip column. Lavandeira then came up with his play on the name of the famous hotel heiress, and became Perez Hilton. He also routinely doctors celebrity photos, arguing that sprinkling cocaine dots on them is a transformative use, entitling him to publish them. A couple years ago, several photo agencies disagreed and slapped him with lawsuits. Still, it's all fun and fair. It seems like he's just upset that someone else has joined in on the game.

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)

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.

We kid, of course. What this really confirms is what we knew all along: DeWolfe is a wannabe Hollywood type; rather than a hit movie, he has a hit website. Or had. It's precisely when stars begin fading that they begin prime targets for the paparazzi. MySpace has seen better days. As has DeWolfe. That he's hanging out with the likes of Hilton tells us all we need to know about the future arc of his career. It reminds us, in fact, of the idea of Yahoo merging with MySpace. Yes, that once seemed hot, too.

How did Ng get them? Here are his instructions, which involve no real hacking or unauthorized access — just typing in Web addresses. They work because Yahoo allows its users to add their MySpace profiles to their cell phones without checking their credentials; it requires a login, but accepts any login, not the specific user's login.

This points to a flaw in the notion of data portability, a movement which seeks to have personal information shared between social networks and other websites. Data portability was borne out of a wrongheaded assumption: That data needs to be shared. Most consumers, I believe, aren't particularly interested in the concept; they belong to a few social networks at most, and don't find managing their online personas to be a particular challenge. The technophiles of Silicon Valley, however, join every network they hear about, and find retyping their personal information and manually adding friends maddeningly inefficient.

It's all well and good to speed things up, but how far, how fast? The example discovered by Ng just demonstrates the tendency of Web companies to take shortcuts with security. With data portability, we won't just have to worry about how well a particular social network guards their personal data; we'll now have to worry about every partner website it connects with.

Technical experts — every engineer in the Valley considers himself one — will no doubt weigh in with elaborate approaches to assuring security. I'm skeptical that any of them will work. It's a combinatorial problem; not only will the protocols have to be designed to be airtight, but we'll have to trust that each website implements them flawlessly. It only takes one weak link to break the chain. Already, Facebook has cut off Google's connectivity to its profiles in a dispute over whether Google's software is secure enough. Even the fame-seeking likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan deserve better.

1. you'll need a Yahoo account. go to www.yahoomail.com and create a yahoo account if you don't have one already. and you will need to go to www.myspace.com to sign up for a myspace account first, if you don't have one already.



2.go to http://beta.m.yahoo.com/w/gallery/widget click on the 'mail' button under "sign in to yahoo!"



3. click on 'click here to sign in'



4. enter your yahoo id, yahoo password



5. then on the top of the screen in the white box, enter: myspace then click Search Widgets Gallery



6. you will see a green box in the middle with the word 'myspace' in there.



7. click the green myspace.



8. see in the middle of the screen it says "add it" - click that.



9. click yes when it asks you about sharing info



10. go here http://beta.m.yahoo.com/w/gallery/widget



11. enter myspace into the box. click search widgets gallery



12. click on the green myspace. now, since you have already set it up in the previous steps, it won't ask you to download again



13. click on 'go to widget' (that’s right below the 'already added it" text



14. now sign in to myspace



15. now take the URL I asked you to save above before step 1: http://beta.m.yahoo.com/w/myspace/profile/en.osl?userID=16527727 and click on it. it may ask you to sign into yahoo or my space. sign in as appropriate. now you should be able to see the person's pictures. if you can only see your own profile, then click on it again http://beta.m.yahoo.com/w/myspace/profile/en.osl?userID=16527727 then it will work.