Links for October 4th 2009 through October 8th 2009:

• Angry Outbursts on Twitter Prompt Lengthy Legal Discussions [NYTimes.com] – “Times are tough for the “tweet before you think” crowd. Courtney Love was sued by a fashion designer after she posted a series of inflammatory tweets, one calling the designer a liar and a thief. A landlord in Chicago sued a tenant for $50,000 after she tweeted about her moldy apartment. And Demi Moore slapped back at Perez Hilton over a revealing photograph of the actress’s daughter. A growing number of people have begun lashing out at their Twitter critics, challenging the not-quite rules of etiquette on a service where insults are lobbed in brief bursts, too short to include the social niceties. Some offended parties are suing.” (Yes, as with all social media, if you think things you post or tweet will ever go away … they won’t.)
• Hotmail users advised to change passwords following information theft [Technology | guardian.co.uk] – “Hotmail users are being advised to change their passwords, after thousands of account details were posted online. A list containing more than 10,000 apparently genuine account names and passwords was posted to a website last week, where it remained until being spotted over the weekend by Microsoft security researchers. The list, which has been seen by the Guardian, appears to be genuine. It only contains usernames beginning with the letters A and B, but covers accounts ending in @hotmail.com, @msn.com and @live.com – three services owned by Microsoft which have more than 280m users worldwide. Although the stolen details have since been taken offline, copies of the list are already available elsewhere on the web – meaning that the details are potentially in the hands of criminals.” (Putting the HOT back into hotmail …)
• Not a Nobel Headline [The Content Makers] – “What on earth is this shit? Australia gets its first female Nobel prize-winning scientist, and The Age runs with the following headline on the front page of its print edition: What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing with a Nobel Prize? Perhaps its meant to be all very po-mo and “oh look we’re so not sexist that we can actually pretend we are sexist in an ironical kind of way, ho ho”. And it is written off the first para, which says that this was what Elizabeth Blackburn was once asked by a family friend. But as a front page splash, it demeans the story to the level of cute human interest, rather than serious breakthrough. It leaves me thinking: What Are Nice Boys Like You Doing With a Newspaper?” (I couldn’t agree more!)
• The life cycle of social networking sites. [Democratic Underground] – Amusing visualisation of the life-cycle of social networking sites, from the ‘New & Cool’ through to the inevitable ‘Cash Grabbing’ phase. Facebook is probably between steps three and four! 🙂
• Google Wave’s unproductive email metaphors [Scoblizer] – Robert Scoble on why Google Wave isn’t really like email at all (which is good, apparently, because email isn’t that productive!).