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.
Most folks don't want to admit it, so I'll lead the charge: I can't get enough of celebrity gossip sites.
Each day, I'll surf to my favorites and find out everything I wanted to know about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and other celebs. It's my guilty pleasure. And by the looks of things, especially if we are to believe a post written by Perez Hilton's founder, which claims his site had 13.9 million page views Monday, I'm not alone.
So let's take a look at some of the prominent celebrity gossip sites across the Web and find out why they're so intriguing.
Defamer
Although Defamer was originally a separate entity under the Gawker Media umbrella, the company's founder and CEO, Nick Denton, announced recently that the site would become a section on Gawker.com to streamline business operations. And although it's not the most popular of the celebrity gossip sites, it's still worth visiting.
The content on Defamer is interesting, but I've found that it tends to be a little late in its reporting, and it's not nearly as compelling as sites like TMZ or Perez Hilton. In fact, despite its name, Defamer is decidedly "nicer" than the competition, and its tries to be more news-oriented than some sites that simply post pictures and comment on the way a particular celebrity looks.
I don't mind that Defamer has chosen to go that way, but as a major Perez Hilton fan, I enjoy the occasional snark.
Perez Hilton
If you haven't been to Perez Hilton to find out all the juicy details on A-list celebs like Angelina Jolie or D-list celebs like LC (Lauren Conrad) from "The Hills," you probably haven't spent enough time on the Web. Believe it or not, this site is, in its own strange way, a Web institution.
Rather than posting videos, a la TMZ, Perez Hilton boasts some of the funniest and most eye-popping stories on celebrities anywhere on the Web. The site is filled with pictures Perez finds of celebrities living their daily lives, which are then edited to include mean-spirited or (at times) nice comments. That said, many of the edits made to the pictures by Perez are adult in nature, so it's best if you read this blog when the kids are asleep.
Perez Hilton has been around for years, and the site's founder, Mario Lavandeira Jr., is one of the most hated people in Hollywood. He doesn't mince any words, and his blog posts, while short, are biting and shoot straight from the hip.
Unlike sites like Defamer, Perez often breaks big stories and has shots of celebrities hours before other gossip sites. Because Perez Hilton is the biggest site in the space, Lavandeira has been cited in a slew of lawsuits, and some celebrities criticize him, saying he goes easy on some and unnecessarily hard on others. He claims that he's tough on everyone.
Regardless, Perez Hilton is a must-see for celebrity watchers. The blog posts are sometimes serious, often funny, and always entertaining.
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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.
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.
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