The Social

John Mayer's deep thoughts on Twitter.

(Credit: Twitter)

So I once went on a movie date with a guy who thought it was sort of weird that I posted to Twitter about the movie in mid-date. In retrospect, it probably was weird, and a bit rude, and I wouldn't do it again (and no, there was no second date). But get a load of this one.

Sources quoted in Star magazine and rehashed by the U.K.'s Telegraph (we can tell this anonymous source is just rock solid) claim that the highly publicized relationship between pop singer John Mayer and actress Jennifer Aniston fizzled because of the evil forces of...Twitter!

"People claiming to be friends of (Aniston) have told Star magazine that she finished the affair after discovering Mayer, 31, spent hours on the networking website, despite telling her he was too busy to get in touch with her," the Telegraph report alleged.

Mayer has become an extremely avid user of the microblogging service (username is @johncmayer), along with fellow celebrities like basketball player Shaquille O'Neal, comedians Jimmy Fallon and John Hodgman, and actor Ashton Kutcher (who famously got his wife, actress Demi Moore, to join Twitter as well).

But now it looks like the celebrity Twitterers may be getting a glimpse of what many of us in the tech industry know already: Chronicling your life in constant 140-character updates doesn't leave much wiggle room once you've gotten used to always telling the world what you're doing. I'm sure more than a few people have gotten in trouble because they Twittered about watching sports at a bar when they'd informed their bosses that they were holed up in bed with the flu.

A concluding note to John Mayer: Look on the bright side. At least this time the tabloids aren't blaming a breakup on infidelity, drug addiction, or the failure to disclose a venereal disease. I know plenty of nice, smart girls who wouldn't mind a Twitter-addicted beau.

I don't think I can come close to beating Kara Swisher's headline at All Things Digital, "Is Wonderwall Gonna Be the One That Saves MSN?"

So I'll just cut to the chase: in a move that seems to be way, way, way out in left field, Microsoft's MSN division has partnered with media company BermanBraun to launch an entertainment news site called Wonderwall.

Geared toward a slightly more highbrow breed of entertainment fan than the Perez Hilton set, Wonderwall primarily aggregates content from other entertainment sites but has an editorial team spearheaded by pop-culture veteran Alex Blagg. (He's on Twitter, natch.)

The launch of Wonderwall comes right before Sunday's Grammy Awards ceremony. It also happens to be timed perfectly to fit two high-profile celebrity scandals, the Michael Phelps up-in-smoke fiasco and the Christian Bale audio freakout.

So--why? Well, big tech players seem to want to have an in-house celebrity news hub, for one reason or another. Time Warner's AOL has the hugely successful TMZ, Yahoo has OMG (and indeed, the interface looks a bit like OMG), and Google has...um...the "entertainment" section of Google News.

And despite this whole "advertising recession" thing, we've seen big tech companies increasingly investing in ad-supported content. Perhaps as blog networks find themselves strapped for cash and print media companies find themselves smacking into financial icebergs, the tech companies see a potential gap in the market.

AOL rolled up all its content properties into a conglomeration called MediaGlow recently. We can only wonder if MSN's Wonderwall is the start of something similar in Redmond.

DeWolfe (in the gray jacket) and Hilton (in the pink dress) leaving a club in L.A. together.

(Credit: X17.com/TechCrunch)

It's not the sort of TechCrunch post you see every day: the Valley blog reported on Friday night that Chris DeWolfe, president of News Corp.'s MySpace, is dating ubiquitous heiress Paris Hilton. It's been going on for a few weeks, editor Michael Arrington wrote, adding that he was tipped off to it when he saw the two together in a video clip from paparazzi site X17.

The gossip column of the New York Post has also mentioned offhand that Hilton has been spotted at parties in a house that DeWolfe has rented in Southampton, N.Y. (That's an upscale summer party town on Long Island, for those of you unfamiliar with mid-Atlantic geography.)

DeWolfe, 42, is married but going through a separation process, according to TechCrunch. Hilton, 27, ostensibly still has a boyfriend, but really, who the heck knows?

Maybe this is what happens after Paris Hilton articulates her proposed energy policy via Web video and receives a resoundingly positive response: she stops dating Greek shipping heirs, B-list musicians, and reality show stars, opting instead for digital-media executives.

It also might be a publicity stunt, a sort of way for DeWolfe to make a statement about MySpace's identity. I mean, could you ever see Mark Zuckerberg doing something like this? TMZ.com once hounded the young Facebook founder as he walked out of a chic restaurant in L.A. with a cute date. In fact, she was his girlfriend of several years; all the pair was willing to do for the cameras was laugh for a few minutes and then walk away.

Buzznet, the social network whose CEO told CNET News.com in April that he'd like to build "the next Viacom," has launched a sister site: Celebuzz, a community for enthusiasts of celebrity news and gossip. It's been in private beta for some time now.

Already dominated by the likes of Perez Hilton, Popsugar, and the AOL-owned TMZ.com, celebrity gossip is a niche of the Web that some might say doesn't need another outlet. But Celebuzz general manager Karina Kogan told CNET News.com that it doesn't matter. Research showed that celebrity gossip fans are more than happy to use "more than one source to get the same exact story. They're interested in different points of view, and frankly, they're happy to look at the same photo ten times, just in different settings."

She also asserted that Celebuzz offers something new. "There is no community dedicated to celebrity out there," Kogan said. "There are news aggregators, there are blogs, but there is no community for the celebrity fans."

(Credit: Celebuzz)

Celebuzz features a full-out social network with user-created content in addition to editorial content coming from in-house reporters, partner bloggers, paparazzi photo agencies, celebrities themselves, and "expert panelists" like celebrities' personal trainers and plastic surgeons. At launch, Kogan said, it's already the "fourth-largest celebrity site on the Internet, period," following People.com, TMZ, and Yahoo's OMG.

Buzznet itself focuses on music, but had already inked "deep partnerships" (read: borderline acquisitions) with celebrity gossip blogs Just Jared and A Socialite's Life. The two social networks are not yet interoperable, but Kogan said that's on the way.

Still, she said, they're meant to be kept separate. "We definitely don't want to shove celebrity media down the throats of music fans," Kogan explained.

The Britney-and-Brangelina crowd may shed a tear (or not): Gawker reported Thursday that the New York Post has closed down PageSix.com, the online arm of its famed gossip page, after just three months in business.

Citing tough economic conditions, PageSix.com Senior Vice President Jennifer Jehn confirmed the shutdown to Gawker's Nick Denton. "Given the difficulty in the economy, it was not the right time for this launch," Jehn reportedly said, adding that the decision would be accompanied by 18 layoffs.

Denton also pointed out that PageSix.com's traffic didn't exactly take off. Here's the thing: With behemoths like AOL's TMZ.com, Sugar Publishing's PopSugar, and the infamous Perez Hilton, online celebrity gossip is a completely saturated market. Despite Page Six's print reputation, it apparently just couldn't compete with Perez's rainbow hair and Microsoft Paint captions.

Nick Denton probably isn't mourning. Gawker Media, which he founded in 2002, operates a number of gossip titles from the eponymous New York media rag to the Hollywood-focused Defamer, and the closing of PageSix.com means one fewer competitor in the mix. But if, as Denton speculates, PageSix.com fell at the hands of an advertising downturn, that could hurt the rest of the gossip press too.

And as a Gawker commenter pointed out, Salon.com ironically published an article about the end of the golden age of celebrity gossip on the same day that PageSix.com closed its doors.

MySpace has unveiled a new MySpace Celebrity site devoted to entertainment culture, which is slated to launch in full on the News Corp.-owned social network on Thursday. The portal will feature news (including gossip aggregated from People magazine's Web site), blogs, and multimedia content pertaining to already-big and fast-rising names in acting, music, comedy, sports, and Page Six notoriety.

MySpace already operates several other 'channels' of aggregated content, including the Impact political channel and an upcoming casual gaming page.

Content on MySpace Celebrity goes beyond gossip, encompassing news about celebrities' charitable endeavors and behind-the-scenes antics on the job. Perhaps most useful, MySpace Celebrity has an index of official celebrity MySpace profiles--more than 300 at launch. As many avid MySpace users know, fake and unofficial celebrity profile pages are a dime a dozen on the social network, and this ideally can create a way to weed those out.

"MySpace Celebrity is Hollywood's new home page," MySpace President and co-founder Tom Anderson said in a statement from the company. "Celebrities have been using MySpace since the site's launch and it's a natural extension for us to now offer them an aggregated channel where they can be in control of their own image...We want MySpace users to connect with celebrities in the same way that they do with musicians."

That's a lofty goal. Long before the News Corp. buyout, MySpace gained heavy buzz as a hub for discovering independent music, and it still continues that role today. There's not quite a perfect analogy to be drawn between an independent band eager to showcase its talent and an outlet for Jessica Alba to promote her latest movie.

Besides, the entertainment news niche is already fully saturated online with the likes of Perez Hilton, Popsugar, the online outlets of magazines like Entertainment Weekly, and the AOL-owned TMZ.com--which grew so big on the Web that it turned to network television.

On the other hand, MySpace has shown that it knows entertainment. As the social-networking leader still struggles to catch up to smaller rival Facebook in terms of technology and networking tools, branding itself as a central point for Web-based pop culture has helped differentiate it. And so far, that's proven at least relatively successful.

Rumors started flying on Thursday morning that CBS had picked up celebrity gossip site Dotspotter for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million. Valleywag reported the dirt first, and the strictly-business PaidContent said that industry sources had confirmed it.

Dotspotter has not yet responded to a request for comment.

CBS' interactive division, headed by Valley veteran Quincy Smith, has been acquisition-happy in recent months, snapping up social music site Last.fm and finance video blog Wallstrip. It's not yet clear whether Dotspotter--or CBS' other digital acquisitions, for that matter--will remain standalone or ultimately be integrated into the media company's existing properties.

Dotspotter, it should be noted, isn't a run-of-the-mill celebrity gossip blog. Founded by former Yahoo executive Anthony Soohoo, the slick and mashup-friendly site features Digg-like social news ranking, aggregated videos, and a Google Maps-based chart of celebrity sightings across the country. As PaidContent and Valleywag pointed out, ex-YouTuber and current Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu is reportedly an investor.

Celebrity gossip remains one of the Web's hottest niches; AOL's TMZ.com, which now has a primetime TV show tie-in, has been such a notable success for the faltering tech company that people actually believed a bizarre analyst report that the entire company would be restructured so that it was TMZ-centric.

Dotspotter founder Soohoo's former company, Yahoo, has launched its own entry into the field, appropriately titled OMG.