(Photo: Chronicle.su)

Court proceedings can be excessively boring; not every hearing can be like an episode of Judge Judy. But if you're the judge, you're KINDA being paid to pay attention--and you're certainly not being paid to IM your wife that plaintiffs are "acting crazy."

The ABA Journal reports that a New Mexico judge has resigned after admitting he sent "excessive and improper" IMs to his wife, also a court employee, during work. Judge Eugenio Mathis admitted he used the court's Internet to send IMs to his wife that including shit talking other judges and "judicial statements" about cases that hadn't been settled. SMH.

The New Mexico Judicial Studies Committee also alleges that Judge Mathis sent sexually explicit IMs to his wife during court time, including one that said, "Don't come knocking if the jury room is rockin." Judge got jokes!

The truly shocking thing? A scandal that involves a man sexting HIS WIFE.

Precipitous!

Whatever happened to make love, not war? Earlier today, Quartz's Christopher Mims tweeted the chart above. It's from the Google Ngram Viewer, which allows the curious and the data-devoted to track the occurrences of particular words or phrases in Google Books. And it seems to show that cybersex--once an Internet rite of passage--has taken a nosedive.

However, the results only go to 2008, which means they totally miss the rise of sexting. Why fire up AIM when one can send dirty missives via SMS? Why bother with a chat room while you could iMessage your undercarriage? Not to mention that no one has yet coined a phrase to describe the art of gChat sex, cybering's more modern descendant.

It's also worth remember that the dataset here is books, which probably aren't the most reliable mirror of humanity's digital mating habits.

Elaine Wherry, Meebo's cofounder (meebo.com)

Remember Meebo, the online tool that allows you to chat via various services like AIM, Yahoo and IRC, all through your browser? As long as your high school's IT guy wasn't very hip, it was the perfect solution to the fact that they always managed to block AIM. Well today, Meebo announced that Google has agreed to acquire it.

According to the Meebo blog:

We are happy to announce that Meebo has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Google!

For more than seven years we’ve been helping publishers find deeper relationships with their users and to make their sites more social and engaging. Together with Google, we’re super jazzed to roll up our sleeves and get cracking on even bigger and better ways to help users and website owners alike.

According to a statement given to The Next Web by Google, the Meebo folks will be joining the Google+ team in Mountain View.

Meebo has seen stagnated growth since the expanding dominance of chat programs like Gchat and Skype, and failed to monetize its instant messaging products, leading to a pivot to a social sharing bar back in 2009.

The company did not disclose an acquisition price, but rumors from last month said it would be a $100 million deal.

"So if this doesn't work out, we can keep the money right?"

Betabeat grabbed a coffee yesterday with a former AOL staffer who worked in the company's corporate development arm. Naturally the conversation turned to Google+, which has been called the fastest growing social network in history. In one sense this is true, the service has registered more than 18 million members in its first few weeks. On the other hand, almost all of these users already belonged to a social network, albeit one not typically thought of in those terms, Gmail.

As Fred Wilson has pointed out, email is actually social's secret weapon. It is the new photo alert in my inbox that typically drives me to Facebook. In the same way it is the bright red notification box in Gmail that has been driving me onto Google+. Which brings us back to AOL, which once upon a time, reigned supreme over email and its close relative, the instant messanger.

"At the time AOL purchased Bebo, we were desperate to get into the social networking space. There was an attempt to buy Facebook, but Zuckerberg basically told us to fuck off." Eventually the company settled on Bebo, which was the biggest social network in Britain.

The bidding for Bebo was mediated by Allen & Co. "They just ran circles around us. It was media guys trying to grab an internet company and they didn't know better." The final purchase price was $850 million dollars. "I later learned that the only other serious bidder, Sony, stopped at $300 million. They basically had us bidding against ourselves."

Much like the marriage of Myspace and News Corp, AOL and Bebo failed to produce positive synergies for either party. The company was eventually sold for an embarrassing $10 million in 2010. "The sad thing was, we had a social network sitting under our noses the whole time, called AIM."

Source: Morgan Stanley via A VC

Like Google, AOL had a base of more than 100 million users who went each day to their inbox and chat windows to communicate with friends, family and co-worker. In the New York media world, AIM still persists at many workplaces as the method of choice for inter-office communication. AOL did attempt to create a social networking component to AIM, called AIM pages, in 2006. But the company never threw significant muscle behind this effort to evolve its massive homegrown user base from email/chat.

via Laughing Squid

It is too early to tell if Google+ will be a lasting success. But its initial momentum is impressive, due in large part to the fact that it relies on email/chat at its core. The integration with Android, which allows for automatic uploads of smartphone photos, means the Google+ is also tied in to the future of computing, mobile. Every time I snap a picture I get a notification in my Gmail inbox, and I have found myself building more photo albums and spending a lot more time inside Google+ than Facebook.

An ad from Backpage.com NYC

Earlier this month Craigslist shut down its adult classified section around the world. This followed a lengthy battle with attorneys general and advocacy groups who accused Craigslist of aiding and abetting child prositution.

A similar charge is being leveled against Backpage.com, the online classified section run by Village Voice Media which features an adult services category. Village Voice Media has asked for the case to be dismissed.

In the meantime, Backpage has seen a big uptick in traffic since Craigslist shut down. The site has been seeing about 2.4 million unique visitors a month. But since Craigslist went offline, that number has grown to nearly 3 million a month.

Since this time last year, the average monthly traffic to Backpage.com for the NY region has nearly tripled. The AIM group, which tracks classified ads, says Backpage.com has emerged as the new leader in ads for prostitution. But while these numbers are significant, AIM says Backpage's growth represents only a fraction of the business that once existed on Craigslist.

"There are clear signs that some revenue and listings are migrating to Backpage and to other sites that specialize in prostitution advertising," said Mark A. Whittaker, an AIM Group consultant. "It doesn’t seem likely that alternative sites will be able to absorb all of the money that had been spent with Craigslist."

Wonder where this leaves VVM's super-secret hipster sex blogs...

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper