(Photo: Twitter)

For the past three weeks, the Twitter account of The Hills' Spencer Pratt has sounded nothing like the notorious MTV villain we all love to hate. Typically comprised of random bro-ish missives and retweets from celebrity magazines with links to articles about the antics of he and his wife, Heidi Montag, the tone of his Twitter began to change as soon as 2013 hit. What exactly happened to the infamous Mr. Pratt?

On January 1st, Ms. Montag tweeted that, following a New Year's Eve blowout, Mr. Pratt had lost his phone in London just before the duo were set to tape a season of Celebrity Big Brother. The next day, January 2nd, Mr. Pratt began tweeting again, but he sounded nothing like himself. "Testing...testing...," he wrote. "Yes, cheers, everyone, this is actually Spencer Pratt!"

Mr. Pratt, not exactly known for his predilection for highbrow literature, appeared to have taken a crash course in English lit. He tweeted asking for bookstore recommendations in London. He began to betray an impressive knowledge of poetry, engaging his followers in clever word games. Even stranger, he did not stop tweeting once he entered the Celebrity Big Brother house, where participants' phones are typically confiscated until the end of taping. He claimed that the producers had allowed him to continue tweeting as a part of the show's plotline, but the producers denied it. Just what exactly was Mr. Pratt up to?

Mr. Pratt's devoted followers began to become suspicious, particularly after the Big Brother producers shot down his latest alibi. Soon the storyline took an unexpected turn: in a series of tweets, it was revealed that the person behind @SpencerPratt was actually a struggling British poet who was simply trying to gain exposure for his literary work. He was in love with two different women, and in a nod to the absurdity of reality television, used his followers to help decide which one to romantically pursue. Now aware that the account was no longer manned by the real Mr. Pratt, @SpencerPratt's followers dubbed the poet Tempspence.

But there was another layer to the story: As it turns out, Tempspence never actually existed. It was all an act, a new type of online performance art. Mr. Pratt's account had been hijacked (with his permission) by two writers named Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig, who have been developing a kind of "catfish lit." Called netprov (network improv narrative), the emerging genre is meant to marry the fast-tempoed nature of internet technology with the traditional ideas of improv. Mr. Wittig describes it as an "emerging art form that creates written stories that are networked, collaborative and improvised in real time."

In fact, the duo had used Mr. Pratt's account to explore the nature of celebrity and reality. "Through the fictional tale of this obscure poet broadcasting from a Reality star’s account, we explored themes of fame, language play, and what it means to be real," wrote the duo in a blog post explaining their work.

On January 26, the real @SpencerPratt returned and explained the nature of the mini hoax to his followers. "Since Jan 1. my account has been run by @markcmarino & @Neprov_Robwit in a #netprov they call: "Reality" http://bit.ly/tempspence #elit," he tweeted. "The obscure poet @tempspence & his romances with Una & Duessa were all part of a work of twitter improv fiction (netprov). Mark & Rob were especially attracted to playing with a story about being real in my account. They were like: What if we gave the most unspencer person the chance to be famous thru my accnt except he couldn't ever say his name?"

Though Mr. Pratt is not known for his devotion to art or literature, it turns out that he first discovered the concept of netprovs when taking Mr. Marino's writing class at USC. Mr. Marino told Betabeat that it was Mr. Pratt's idea to use his Twitter account as the stage for the netprov.

"Spencer was introduced to netprovs when he took my writing class at USC," Mr. Marino said. "He read my story The Ballad of Workstudy Seth (my first netprov) and played a netprov called The Fantasy Automated Investors League (http://robwit.net/fail/).  I actually think the form meshed very well with his experience on Reality TV, which is basically improvising 'real life.' He seemed to also enjoy the opportunity to be more creative since he wasn't tied to his caricatured persona in the netprov."

"The real Spencer has a genuine love of poetry and owns a signed first-edition of Robert Frost's work," added Mr. Marino.

You can read the full list of tweets sent during the netprov here (PDF).

Ms. Cavallari just had her baby ten weeks ago and she looks like she did in the first season of Laguna Beach. While all of the other reporters were busy asking her about little Camden Jack, Betabeat wanted to know if Ms. Cavallari was actually in fact a Bing user or if she was still searching with Google on the sly.

"I do use it," she said. "I actually just took the Bing It On test and Bing won and I'm not just saying that." Another reporter laughed in suspicion and Ms. Cavallari replied, "No, honestly! I was surprised."

This reporter knew that the smile she was using was the same one she employed in The Hills' sixth season, when she would tell Brody that she didn't want to date him. We were suspicious and asked her again if she was still secretly using Google. "I used to," she said. "But now I'm going to use Bing. I'm excited about that."

Baby questions were a safer topic and we wondered if Ms. Cavallari had let her little man play around on an iPad yet. "I haven't introduced any technology item--technological items to him yet," She said. " But I don't know, I don't know how I feel about that. I'll start waiting a couple years until I start giving him iPads and iPhones. He has his whole life to enjoy that."

When asked if she had any favorite apps, Ms. Cavallari name dropped Words With Friends and said she used Uber to hitch a ride on the way over here. She also said that she uses "all of the baby apps" and that she used some when she was pregnant. ("I loved the Pampers one!")

But her memory wasn't so clear on app specifics. "I don't remember any of them," she said and laughed loudly. "I'm the wrong person you should be talking to!"

(Photo: Indiegogo)

A few weeks ago, Betabeat wrote about an Indiegogo campaign started by Whitney Port, star of The Hills and The City. Ms. Port began the campaign to raise $50,000 so that she could show her fashion line, Whitney Eve, at New York Fashion Week Spring 2013.

But today, when we went to check up on the campaign's progress, the funding goal had mysteriously dropped by $40,000. Now, Ms. Port is only soliciting $10,000.

Betabeat has learned that Indiegogo agreed to change the fundraising goal for Ms. Port's campaign. She is an Indiegogo partner, which is why both parties agreed to lower the goal.

“The goal was lowered as we got other cooperate beauty sponsors and didn’t want to continue to raise funds we didn’t need from the fans," a publicist for Ms. Port told Betabeat.

For some background: Indiegogo offers two funding options when users opt to create a campaign. There's the "flexible funding" option, where users get to keep however much money they raise, regardless of if they ever meet their goal. The catch here is that Indiegogo retains a 9 percent fee for all money raised during a flexible funding campaign if creators don't meet their goal (vs. 4 percent if they do). On the flipside, a fixed funding campaign--which is what Ms. Port is running--has a stated goal, and the project creator only gets funding if that goal is reached. For successful fixed funding campaigns, Indiegogo retains 4 percent of funds raised.

Four percent of $10,000 is only $400, so it's highly unlikely that Indiegogo would bend its own rules just for a couple hundos. But the incident raises some important questions about crowdfunding and the difference between the experiences of corporate and average users. So far, Indiegogo's most high profile campaign was for Karen Klein, the bullied bus monitor. The Oatmeal, a renowned web comic creator, also ran a wildly successful campaign on the site. But for the most part, campaigns on Indiegogo are created by regular, every day people without connections to Hollywood.

Will Indiegogo begin to allow other users, who aren't celebrities or "partners," to change their fixed fundraising goals if projects aren't taking off the way they'd hoped?

(Photo: Fav IM)

If last weekend's Laguna Beach marathon wasn't enough to quench your thirst for early-aughts era reality TV, perhaps this news fresh out of Ad Week will do the trick. Sources say that Twitter is looking to host an exclusive reality web series developed by one of the producers of fan favorite drama The Hills, delivered either as content tweeted and promoted in-stream, or on a standalone Twitter page like the company's recent NASCAR promotion.

Despite the fact that the search tool still sucks, the current incarnation of the Twitter platform works well in conjunction with watching TV: Brands have long since adopted appending a hashtag to the bottom corner of a screen during a program. But actually helping to develop original content to serve up exclusively on Twitter is a whole other game.

Writes Ad Week:

Twitter is said to be aiming towards changing the way people consume and discover media. “We’re talking about building content on top of Twitter,” said another industry insider. “That’s a big deal.” Twitter wouldn’t be developing the content, but would instead serve as a distribution vehicle and advertising middleman.

Sounds a lot like YouTube's bid for original programming. With this news, we like to picture YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar weeping a single black tear.

All there's left to do is to forgive and forget, Twitter. Mr. Kamangar wants to forgive you, and he wants to forget you.