Mr. Sassa (Photo: Wikimedia)

Our prediction for employment trends of 2013? A "no sexting" clause in your contract.

The New York Post reports that Scott Sassa, a top executive at Hearst, has been forced to resign after a Los Angeles-based stripper forwarded he sexts he sent her to Hearst's "very conservative top brass."

Mr. Sassa is a veteran of the tech and media industries. He served a short stint as the CEO of Friendster, acted as CEO in residence for Kleiner Perkins, and was the CEO and cofounder of Uber (no, not that Uber), before becoming president of Hearst's entertainment and syndication group, which manages interests in ESPN and Lifetime, among others.

According to Page Six:

“She was texting him sexy pictures, and he was responding using words you absolutely would not want your bosses to see,” a source said, adding, “He was also communicating with many other girls in New York, and wrote crazy things to them.”

The stripper's boyfriend (just to up the tawdry factor) helped her alleged extortion attempts of Mr. Sassa, a single dad. Not to worry though, all this unprofessional behavior will earn him a “large compensation package for him to go away for a long time."

As a source told Page Six:

“Hearst prides itself on being a very ethical, clean-cut company. William Randolph Hearst must be rolling over in his grave.”

Pretty hazy memory of Mr. Hearst's exploits at home and at the office, huh?

Oh No They Didn't and its disconcerting new interface.

Break out the "Bright Eyes," over-sharers! LiveJournal, the no. 1 blogging platform of choice for navel-gazers in the early aughts is sending out notices this week that, "LiveJournal is planning to start deleting inactive empty accounts." A reader who received the email yesterday sent us a copy, but from the  chatter on the site, it seems they're not the only one.

Don't dig a digital grave next to your Friendster testimonials and MySpace spam just yet, however. The purge, which LiveJournal has instituted at various times before, looks to be part of a recent attempt to win back American hearts and minds.

As Fast Company recently reported, LiveJournal, which since 2007 has been the de facto Russian Wordpress and province of Singapore's Etsy-esque "blogshop" owners, wants to make a triumphant return stateside. Internet history buffs will recall that LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick sold his service to Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, back in 2005. Two years after that, Six Apart turned around and sold LiveJournal to SUP, a Russian online media company run by Alexander Mamut, one of the lesser-known Russian Internet oligarchs who first caught the public's eye during a money-laundering scandal with the Russian presidency when he earned the nickname "the Yeltsin family banker."

Under its new owners, the company, which is still popular with a loyal, niche group of "fan fiction writers, gamers, and various other Internet denizens," for its social networking functionality, is emphasizing community with makeovers for popular sites like Oh No They Didn't and AnythingDisney that include, "custom widgets to highlight frequent commenters," "new metric tracking and analysis systems," and "new, community-driven interface seemingly designed to deemphasize blog content."

They're even offering the carrot that most thriving Internet subcultures crave: pseudonymity.

"According to LiveJournal general manager Anjelika Petrochenko, LiveJournal's planning a major 2012 push based around attracting new users to community sites. Petrochenko told Fast Company that the blogging service was planning between 10-50 new community sites by the end of 2012. These new community sites will offer organizers and admins highly detailed metrics and statistics on user activity that appear to be more detailed than Facebook. Petrochenko also stressed that LiveJournal accounts do not have to be tied to a real name/identity and offered greater anonymity than other social networks. However, LiveJournal has been involved in numerous censorship controversies in the past."

The one community that's not biting is the 10 million monthly uniques who currently visit LiveJournal in the U.S., like "Game of Thrones" creator and active online diarist George R.R. Martin.

As commenter Ardath Rekha wrote in response to the Fast Company piece:

"I don't know why a company thinks that the way to repair more than four years of neglect and discourtesy is by giving the site a face-lift.  Especially when said face-lift is aesthetically unappealing, W3C-noncompliant, ADA-noncompliant, known to give users migraines, and ugly as sin to boot.  But it's nice to get confirmation about who they've actually been trying to please while they've been busy shafting us.

Rest assured, LJ's comeback in America is already as dead in the water as the Costa Concordia."

Timely digs! See, those LiveJournalers still got it!

As for the rest of you "inactive empty" bloggers who never managed to fill your LiveJournal with all your angst and dreams, you've still got a couple weeks, according to the email notice: "Pursuant to our housekeeping policy, your LiveJournal account [REDACTED] l is scheduled to be deleted in 15 days. If you wish to reactivate your account to avoid deleting, please visit http://www.livejournal.com and log in within 15 days of this notification."

Photo: flickr.com/photos/neoblitz

"Embarassingly got this out of the blue... on my AOL account," writes a friend of Betabeat, forwarding an email headlined "A Personal Message from Friendster's CEO." That would be Ganesh Kumar Bangah, founder of MOL, the Malaysian company that acquired Friendster last year and just re-launched the network as a gaming site.

And what an acquisition! "Friendster pioneered social networking and ignited the social media industry that has created billion dollar companies such as Facebook and Twitter, companies that may not have existed in their present form if not for Friendster's early innovation," he writes.

He writes of the moving power of Friendster:

...Many people have come up to me to tell me how Friendster has changed their lives. Many have told me that they have found their life partners over Friendster. Just last week, a successful Internet entrepreneur in Singapore told me that her success was triggered by promoting her business on Friendster.

"Today, as Friendster reinvents itself as a social gaming destination that enables its users to create multiple avatars, play games and enjoy rewards," Mr. Bangah says. "I hope that all of you will wish us luck and continue to support us in our new reincarnation."

Translation: Show some respect, ya little 2.0 twerps. And log in to the new Friendster using your existing username and password. We're adding location awareness and badges soon, he promises.