(Photo: Amazon)

Front Page Printed Pages of the Internet Just before taking stage at SXSW to talk his crowdfunded Internet 2012 tour, Alexis Ohanian emailed out a link to his new book, Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed.

Since you asked, Mr. Ohanian, we dig the cover, but "without their permission," sounds a little iffy in the context of Reddit's Creepshot scandal, no?

Last week, we wondered when Mr. Ohanian was running for office already. “Alas no,” he emailed back. “I'm not going to rule anything out but right now I'm having too much fun (and impact) from my place in the private sector.” However, as the Young Entrepreneur Council founder Scott Gerber pointed out, Mr. Ohanian does happen to own the domain name ohanian2013.com.

Just checking in 525,600 minutes. How do you measure a year in the life of a (defoundered) man? Earlier this week, on the anniversary of his abrupt departure from Foursquare, cofounder Naveen Selvadurai posted a recap of the last 12 months. Don't expect to learn much about what he's been working on, though. Think more in daylights, in sunsets, in midnights and cups of coffee.

Mr. Selvadurai lost the founder 15; he traveled; he saw his family and friends; he traveled some more; he read books; he went to Disney and rode Space Mountain many times; he learned to drive stick; he went to the Olympics. "I always kept saying 'year 30' wouldn’t be such a big deal and that it’s just like any other. it turned out to be so much more and i’m grateful for that," he reflected.

Oh, but he might have picked up a bit of a gloomy streak, too:

this is how the war will start - "ohio man charged with shooting robot" singularityhub.com/2013/03/04/ohi…

— naveen (@naveen) March 6, 2013

(Photo: Instagram/Dens)

So (proto)typical Google Glasses are now just popping up everywhere, it seems. The latest sighting comes via Digg community manager Veronica De Souza: "SPOTTED: A skater bro wearing google glass in bedstuy. Who are you?" she tweeted. Betebeat welcomes any intel as to the identity of this mystery man, so we can pester him until he lets us try his specs on.

Maybe Dennis Crowley knows the guy. The Foursquare cofounder recently, "lost my Google Glass virginity."

(Photo: Instagram/Fred Benenson)

Spotted! Our friends at Quora--the erudite agoraphobe’s answer to Yahoo! Answers--never got the memo that print was dead. Thus earlier this year, the site opted to publish a 441-page hardcover book called “The Best of Quora,” featuring 131 primers. Forbes called it a “fascinating, enchanting, exasperating book,” and wondered if the inquiring minds of Quora were “too clever” for their own good.

Author Clive Thompson and Kickstarter’s Fred Benenson got to thumb through the pages and see for themselves when they spotted a copy “in the wild” at Lil Frankie’s Pizza in the East Village. Mr. Thompson said on Instagram that he received an advanced copy this week. As Bill Couch, a front-end product engineer at Twitter explained in the comments, “[Quora] issued them as gifts to the authors of those answers at the end of last year, then provided it as a PDF online.”

Guess the question about Betabeat didn’t make the cut.

:( Guys, we think Tumblr really hurt Shelby.tv cofounder Reece Pacheco feelings. He recently published a long, sad blog post announcing, "Tumblr I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down." Nothing says heartache like LCD Soundsystem! So what set Mr. Pacheco off? He logged into Tumblr the other day, as he does regularly, and found himself subjected to a laborious, drawn-out attempt to get him to follow more blogs. Then, he was given a few hovering tool tips--on a service he's been using for years.

He did not like this!

Thing is, I wouldn’t be so frustrated with you, Tumblr, if I didn’t love the platform so much. If you were just some other social network, I’d say “Do whatever you want. I don’t care. Your only value is your scale.”

But that’s not you, so don’t treat me like some number. You know I’m active. You know I’m a creator more than a reblogger. Treat me that way and show me some added benefit, rather than just trying to get more mindless engagement out of me.

Sorry, Reece--those revenue targets aren't gonna hit themselves.

Mmm, cake Happy birthday to GroupMe cofounder Steve Martocci, who got quite the gift in celebration. There's a Vine of the festivities, but here's a teaser:

Looks like a party, alright!

High fashion Huffpo cofounder Kenny Lerer is well known around Silicon Alley as an investor. But did anyone know he is, as his son Ben Lerer put it on Twitter, "fcking fashionable"? Mr. Lerer the Elder recently appeared in a New York Times profile of Laurent DeLouya, "the amiable proprietor of a hair salon that over 50 years has amassed a following that is kind of a cultural Core Club." Papa Lerer told the Times he'd "walk over hot coals for Laurent,” and apparently Mr. DeLouya performed baby Ben's first haircut at age 3.

We yearn to someday achieve that kind of rapport with a stylist.

User #279 Your user number can be a figure of pride among the tech set. If it's low enough it signals that you're an early adopter, and makes you feel cool, which is kinda sad if you think about it cuz like, look at your life.

"I'm User No. 279," humblebragged New York Times tech writer Nick Bilton in a recent Twitter back and forth. "I got @dens drunk and [sic] Nick Denton's house and made him give me a beta account."

Whatever works.

For roughly a year now--almost six months since I wrote a wildly popular column about it for The Observer--Facebook has been pushing an utterly duplicitous and embarrassing business model.

The scheme: Facebook posts are seen by only a woeful fraction of a company’s total fans or subscribers (often less than 15 percent). And conveniently, that percentage is controlled by Facebook, while the site simultaneously offers an expensive "service" that allows companies to pay to reach its own fans. This throttling quickly became a source of millions of dollars of revenue for the social network.

It's about as plain and malignant a case of conflict of interest can get. One that only Facebook would dare to try.

Small businesses and entrepreneurs have reacted vehemently against it, even going as far as to create a protest called “I Want My Friends Back”. Mark Cuban threatened to stop using the platform over it. Hell, the whole thing is old enough that the inevitable counter-backlash already came and went.

But only now, when Nick Bilton at the New York Times experienced it himself, did the phenomenon suddenly hit the top of Techmeme.

Some of the tweets from Bilton's colleagues are pretty amazing: "I dunno, I kind of feel like we knew this was coming eventually," writes Anthony De Rosa, a Reuters columnist and social media editor.

Indeed! We knew it because it already happened.

Felix Salmon, also of Reuters, tweeted back to Bilton at the Times, "Insofar as it applies only to fans/subscribers rather than actual friends, surely not a big deal."

Except that's not true either. In October, TechCrunch revealed that Facebook was expanding the program so that users needed (or could choose, depending on your interpretation) to pay $7 to extend the reach about "important announcements" like weddings, garage sales or parties.

I don't mean to pile on any of these well-meaning writers. (Some, like Zach Seward at Quartz, pretty much nailed it with his analysis of how Facebook tweaks "the black box that is EdgeRank," in order to promote and incentivize features). They are right to be outraged and perplexed. Facebook's pay-for-placement program is ridiculous. Except it's been ridiculous for quite some time. And apparently part of the reason Facebook has been able to get away with it is that few media gatekeepers, who are supposed to follow this stuff for a living, know how the platform really works.

The common dismissal I’ve seen from far too many journalists--“how else should Facebook make money?”--implies that they or their sources just don’t understand the ad business. They aren’t able to see that Facebook’s sponsored story play is fundamentally different from most ad models.

Take Tumblr’s new ad platform Radar, on which I have done six-figures worth of buying for my client American Apparel. To create it, Tumblr designed entirely new advertising space on the platform that people have to pay to be a part of. In that case, buyers didn’t previously have access to it so if they want it, they have to pay for it. Tumblr’s interest is to make that space as attractive and valuable as possible to buyers, so they’ll pay for it. In this case, our interests are aligned--however long it took Tumblr to get here.

That’s very different from Facebook’s model, in which the worse Facebook posts ‘work’ for brands, the more brands will need to pay Facebook. That means that Facebook and I now have divergent interests. Intentionally or not, the less my posts show up, the more I need to spend to cover the difference, especially since brands have invested in and become dependent on Facebook over the years.

Facebook has put itself in an ugly position. Even if they’re not doing anything with it right now—it looks like they easily could. To me, it doesn’t seem any different than someone like Goldman Sachs or any financial firm being short a position that they turn around and sell to an unsuspecting client as an investment. The worse it does for their client, the better it is for the house. Why even risk the potential impropriety? Greed is the only answer. I seem to remember we fined a ton of Wall Street analysts during the first dotcom bubble for exactly such a maneuver.

Does Facebook have a ‘right’ to operate this way–to throttle access and charge unequally for passage? As a for-profit company, they absolutely do. It’s just bafflingly shortsighted--and borderline unethical--to anyone who really thinks about it for two seconds.

I’m just starting to realize that most tech media have neglected to do that.

And THAT is why Facebook has gotten away with this appalling bait-and-switch. That's how they’ve been boldly able to be (and remain) broken on purpose.

Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of  Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator and a PR strategist for brands and writers.

Gallery gurl.

Yesterday night, Vine, the video-clip sharing app Twitter acquired back in October, held its launch party at Marquee. Yes, that Marquee. DJs spun above a lighted sign with the hashtag "#party," and users obliged by Vine-ing the experience.

There was the meta-Vine of people Vine-ing at the Vine launch. And, because no one got the memo, an attempt to do the white man's Harlem Shake. Although our favorite had to be a guest appearance from "Gallery Girl" Chantal Chadwick.

Chantal from "Gallery Girls" at last night's Vine party: vine.co/v/b6Egw5WnxTT

— Rex Sorgatz (@fimoculous) February 22, 2013

"I guess the interesting thing was that it wasn't a tech-heavy crowd," one guest told Betabeat. "This sounds strange to say, but it felt more like a cultural event, almost something you would have witnessed in pre-millennial NYC." Hey, if the bubble fits.

As for Vine itself, by February 19 the app--which hung in the top 10 spot for the first week of its existence--had fallen to number 73 in the rankings of free apps, according to AppData. Maybe everyone needs to up their video game?

(Photo: Instagram via TMZ)

Snoop In Startupland According to TMZ, Snoop Dogg and Suge Knight buried the hatchet at AV Club in Los Angeles this week. And who should take credit for the amicable reunion but Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who was photographed in the VIP section along with Snoop, Mr. Knight, and venture capitalist and Uber advisor Shervin Pishevar.

.@uber making peace in the LBC: tmz.com/2013/02/22/sno…#sugeANDsnoop cc/@shervin @snoopdogg

— travis kalanick (@travisk) February 22, 2013

Snoop, who's palled around with Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg in the past, is slated to appear at SXSW Interactive next month to promote Leap Motion, a hand gesture controller. Hey Mike Judge, you may want to take a gander at our reporter's notebook.

Type-uhoh Brit Morin, founder of Brit + Co. and wife to Path founder Dave Morin, might have run into a little autocorrect problem. "Catch this week's BritList for your daily dose of dishonesty," she tweeted last week.

Dishonesty? Either that's a typo, or Ms. Morin had some sort of come-to-Jesus moment about the real truth behind the perilous world of crafting.

(Photo: Twitter)

Trivial Pursuit Techstars' former managing director, Dave Tisch, may have recently left the incubator, but that doesn't mean he's resting on his laurels. Mr. Tisch Instagrammed a slightly humblebraggy photo showing some spoils from a recent trip to Dave & Busters. "Successful evening dominating trivia," he captioned the photo, which showed hundreds of arcade tickets flowing out of paper cups. The real question is what he brought with those tickets. Our bet's on the 2006-era iPod.

(Photo: Instagram)

Caught with his pants down New York Times technology writer Nick Bilton is really, really excited for both Google Glass and Apple's rumored iWatch. Like, so excited he doesn't even give a f*ck about pants. Can't say he's not dedicated to his craft.

https://twitter.com/nickbilton/status/304666533190332416

FacePlace Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In hits bookstores in March, and feedback is already trickling out. One reviewer? Mark Zuckerberg, who popped into a Facebook conversation and said, "I think 'radically realistic' is a very good description of what you write in this book." We can't say we're entirely surprised "work harder" as a solution to gender inequality would appeal to a workaholic kid billionaire.

Who needs Zuck's support when you've got Ms. Sandberg's infinite self-confidence, though? She recently appeared in the documentary Makers saying, "I always thought I would run a social movement." Well all righty then!

(Update, 2/26/12) Turns out, there's a little more context to that line about running a social movement, beyond what the New York Times quoted Ms. Sandberg as saying. The Grey Lady has issued a correction:

In a video excerpt, which accompanied the article online, she said: “I always thought I would run a social movement, which meant basically work at a nonprofit. I never thought I’d work in the corporate sector.” She did not merely say, “I always thought I would run a social movement.”

Robot rock Who can resist a little hashtag trolling?

#ifihadglass my individuality would serve the collective. Shields lowered, ready to assimilate... #resistanceisfutile twitter.com/smart/status/3…

— Steve Martocci (@smart) February 20, 2013

Baby, baby, baby A social media mystery to ponder, from Twitter biz dev VP Jana Messerschmidt: "Photos of babies on Facebook annoy me, while Vines of babies make my day. Why is this?" We're going to guess it's the cooing noises.

(Screencap: YouTube)

Google announced a campaign this morning that would allow non-developers to score a pair of Google Glass by tweeting a missive about what you'd do with the specs along with the hashtag #ifihadglass. The whole thing quickly devolved into a bunch of bad Twitter jokes. But techies, it seems, are pretty desperate to get their hands on Glass.

First, we have tech writer Jason Kincaid, who made a music video about how badly he wants Glass. If he doesn't win, at least now the Internet knows what a magical singing voice he has.

Business Insider writer Nich Carlson wants to use it to make "better, experience based slideshows." NEW MEDIA JACKPOT.

https://twitter.com/nichcarlson/status/304213322637660162

There were the suckups:

https://twitter.com/ajt/status/304233891315732481

https://twitter.com/nickbilton/status/304282064851726336

The impossibly topical entries:

https://twitter.com/spencerchen/status/304260383093452800

https://twitter.com/spencerchen/status/304289259341369344

https://twitter.com/alexismadrigal/status/304279568301301760

The geniuses:

https://twitter.com/joshgreenman/status/304299102353649664

https://twitter.com/BarryTheArtGuy/status/304312879283322881

The humblebraggers:

https://twitter.com/jeffjarvis/status/304308390925049856

https://twitter.com/Natkinns/status/304313587592224768

And of course, the doubters.

https://twitter.com/bendreyfuss/status/304300046164324352

https://twitter.com/bendreyfuss/status/304304671449808898

https://twitter.com/kashhill/status/304281088258359296

As for Betabeat, we made the completely rational and reasonable offer of our left kidney, but are still waiting for a response from Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google/Babies.

Mr. Lyons traced the start of Apple's whisper (in a reporter's ear) campaign back to TechCrunch blogger, investor, and Apple stock holder MG Siegler, who called the time it takes to pull an all-serving computer out of his own pocket "insane." That was followed by an impromptu treatise on the iWatch's ability to "fill a gaping hole in the Apple ecosystem" from Cupertino's former interface designer.

Rumors graduated to reports with Mr. Bilton repeating the same Dick Tracy reference as Mr. Siegler, except with better access:

Bilton even got an interview with the CTO of Corning Glass Technologies, the company that supplies Apple with glass for the iPhone. The Corning guy doesn’t talk specifically about making a watch, but he says that it could be done. What’s noteworthy here is that this is one of Apple’s big suppliers talking to the press, on the record, about something that brushes up against Apple. If you know anything about Apple you know that this doesn’t happen without Apple’s permission. Don’t believe me? Go try to get an interview with Foxconn, about anything, and see if they’ll do it without Apple’s permission.

Wouldn't you know, things are already looking up.

That's not the only theory as to why we've suddenly been treated to details about futuristic new product. Watching the iWatch also coincides with Pebble buyers--who fronted the Kickstarter project $10 million--finally receiving their smartwatch orders.

https://twitter.com/AlexJamesFitz/status/300984700808347648

Buyers who haven't yet received Pebble arm candy are already considering jumping ship . . . for an unavailable product.

It's hard to imagine Apple is seriously threatened. Ben Kessler, Crowdtap's director of marketing, says Pebble is fun, but still feature light: "Just controls music and shows incoming calls and SMS on iOS." Mr. Bilton predicts that "Pebble would be to iWatch as Kindle was to iPad."

But status-obsessed startup types still need something to Instabrag about. So behold! The unboxing is upon us. (Fuelbands are so 2012.)

Gizmodo's Sam Biddle sluttin' it up at CES. (Photo: Gizmodo)

News of the first annual Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day swept across the web this morning following an article penned by one of the event's founders, gaming and social media reporter Leigh Alexander. "From booth babes to harassment, snide comments to double standards, women have often had a hard time feeling comfortable around the tech industry," she wrote. In order to demonstrate "the absurdity of objectifying people you claim to agree with or support intellectually," she's encouraging female tech writers to give gendered compliments or make sexist proclamations to men about their work.

Though the actual Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day isn't until February 1st, Betabeat--comprised primarily of female writers--could hardly contain ourselves. Here are 25 gendered comments for 25 of our favorite male tech writers.

Walt Mossberg: What's a pretty face like yours doing buried in those product specs?

Mike Isaac: Shut up, honey, the women (Kara and Liz) are talking.

Ryan Tate: Started a flame war with Steve Jobs just to get some attention.

Sam Biddle: Hey baby, want a massage?

Mat Honan: It's cute how you just discovered two-step authentication last year.

David Pogue: All your scoops come from your PR girlfriend.

Michael Arrington: Swaggy? More like bitchy. Men should keep their opinions to themselves.

Steven Levy: Only wears glasses to look more authentically geeky.

John Herrman: 17 Ways John Herrman Uses His Looks to Get Ahead

Peter Kafka: You smell amazing.

Farhad Manjoo: Maybe I'd take you more seriously if your Twitter avatar wasn't so suggestive.

Anil Dash: Nag!

Peter Ha: Only a celebrated reporter because he can fill out a hoodie.

Carl Franzen: Just because it's an all-night hackathon doesn't mean you shouldn't put in a little effort.

Om Malik: He just googled some companies to look cool, he doesn’t really get tech.

Eric Eldon: We know Alexia does all the work and you were just hired as window dressing.

Ben Popper: Why are you being MEAN to STARTUPS?

Josh Topolsky: Why don't you go back to makeup reviews?

Steve Kovach: Your obsession with Snapchat proves you're a sexting slut.

Jason Del Rey: Your Twitter presence is adorable.

Nick Bilton: Maybe try an industry where you'd fit in better, like construction.

Ashlee Vance: Who'd you sleep with to get on the Techmeme leaderboard?

Bryan Goldberg: We never see you around at tech parties. You should come outttttt more.

Christopher Mims: FAKE GEEK GUY ALERT

Adrian Chen: Pretending to like Reddit so he can be the only boy in a girls' club.

Brian X. Chen: What's a nice boy like you doing at a gadget convention?

The fake op-ed in question. (Photo: opinion-nytimes.com)

Early this morning, a pro-WikiLeaks op-ed purporting to be penned by former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller cropped up online. It was a stunningly convincing piece of web fraud, its design practically identical to the New York Times's own homepage, with every link leading to an actual Times article or section. The only hint that it wasn't real was the URL: instead of showing as nytimes.com/pages/opinion, it read "opinion-nytimes.com." It's a tiny difference, but a monumentally important one.

The article itself, which staunchly defends WikiLeaks and the importance of qualifying it under the First Amendment, is certainly stylistically similar to the real writings of Mr. Keller. Some of the wording is rather clunky, but that seems to lend the piece the impression that its message was so dire that it was written in an emotional hurry. The faux article tries so hard to be convincing that it even borrows wording from an email Mr. Keller wrote recently to GigaOm about WikiLeaks.

The fake op-ed immediately radiated across Twitter, with several journalism and tech luminaries--including, most embarrassingly, the Times's own technology writer Nick Bilton--falling for the hoax before it was debunked. The official WikiLeaks Twitter account dove into the fray, tweeting the op-ed before following up with retweets by people conjecturing about what exactly happened. [See our update at the bottom.]

Mr. Bilton uncovered a fake Twitter account that replaced one of the lowercase "l's" in @NYTkeller with a capital "I," further complicating the story. Many thought that the op-ed was tweeted by Mr. Keller himself, when in fact it was done by a fake account.

What's more, a fake PayPal blog was created to voice support for the New York Times's alignment with WikiLeaks. Whoever staged this prank had a ton of help, or a ton of time on their hands.

So who's behind this elaborate hoax? Domain registration data indicates that opinion-nytimes.com was registered back in March, so whoever is behind this ruse was clearly waiting for the right time to launch it. (What better than a summer Sunday morning as people are enjoying their paper and coffee?)

Whoever registered it was also incredibly detail-oriented: the WhoIs information for the fake site notes the registrant as "Ellen Herb," the same person who is listed as the registrant for the real nytimes.com URL. Sneaky!

Betabeat searched for some of the related queries in the WhoIs data and found that opinion-nytimes.com possesses the same NIC handle as "blocknytimes.org," another site registered on Gandi, a French domain hoster. The fake PayPal blog also possesses the same NIC handle.

While blocknytimes.org doesn't yield many leads, there is a Twitter account for (Do Not) BlockNYTimes, which purports to be part of the hacker collective Anonymous. They're definitely supportive of the op-ed--if not directly involved with the hoax--as they've tweeted about it numerous times. They were also one of the first to tweet a link to the piece.

From what Betabeat can gather, there is a grassroots conservative group called "Block the NYTimes" that believes the Times and WikiLeaks are both guilty of treason for leaking U.S. military secrets. The official WikiLeaks account tweeted about them a few weeks ago, to which the "Do Not Block NYTimes" Anonymous group responded, "We are on it. BTW, Anonymous loves you."

UPDATE: WikiLeaks admitted that it was in on the hoax, along with "its supporters," which we assume means the Do Not Block NYTimes group. A little over an hour ago they tweeted, "Yes. We admit it. WikiLeaks (Assange & co) and our great supporters where behind the successful NYTimes banking blockade hoax on @nytkeller."

Further, they credited Julian Assange with the following quote: "If the NYTimes cannot act with honnor to defend their 'sources' from economic censorship then we'll just have to do it for them :)."

Here is a timeline of the hoax published by WikiLeaks on Pastebin.

Mr. Assange must be growing bored after being holed up in that Ecuadorian embassy for so long.

Additional reporting contributed by Steve Huff.

Transparent, square, and white. Yep, sounds like bankers.

Wonder what Saul Hansell, founding editor one of the founding bloggers at the The New York Times Bits blog who subsequently went to AOL, then Huffington Post, and now betaworks, is feeling now? The Times tech blog is blossoming into a bi-coastal blog empire with writers in Seattle, San Francisco and New York, and just announced expanded coverage including a weekly column and daily newsletter and simplified, uber-webby, un-Timesy new logo.

It's seemingly an answer to the question we've seen bubble up on Twitter every so often: "what if Bits spun out of the NYT?" Although the blog is one of the tech news aggregator Techmeme's top referrers, Bits has to cater to Times readers who lack the ravish appetite for insidery, wonkish morsels that TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, Betabeat and the rest of the tech blogosphere thrive on. As a result, it sometimes lacks the cutting-edge feel—although entrepreneurs know it's good for mainstream traffic and prestige. Bits reporter Jenna Wortham is frequently out at local tech events, as was blogger Nick Bilton before he jumped coasts.

We've heard rumblings of the Bits expansion for some time now, along with rumors of other tech blogs ramping up coverage, especially in New York, as tech becomes trendier and more mainstream. "It’s been more than four years since Bits made its debut," writes Bitsman Damon Darlin. "In that time you’ve made it one of the most frequented blogs at the The New York Times and one of the most prominent tech sites on the Web." Ooh, but you still capitalize "web!"