Today in Opinions: Bill Keller, in the NYT and Emma Keller in the Grauniad wrote dumb editorials about Lisa Bonchek Adams's public experience with cancer. Emma Keller's has since been pulled by the Guardian for reasons which will probably have changed again by the time you read this, but a cached copy is here. PJ Vogt has a good overview in the TLDR blog and Megan Garberwrote what will probably be the definitive reaction piece in the Atlantic, but the gist is that professional opinion writing should end sooner rather than later.
Josh Miller, Obvious Corp backed founder of the little-used web conversation tools Branch and Potluck failed all the way up to the top of a Japanese mountain, where he "haphazardly" revealed today that he and (some of) his team have been acqui-hired by Facebook. The rumor is that the Twitter mafia buyout fee was $15 million. Branch-watchers immediately recalled how Miller characterized Facebook as having "an irreversibly bad brand" just one year ago, but was suddenly "Bullish on Facebook" by December 30th. Given the time it takes to put together a $15 million buyout deal, that latter post looks pretty blatantly self-serving now, but no one ever accused Miller of being unable to kiss the correct ass at the correct time. Early Branch engineering hire Ian Ownbey will not be going along, tweeting "I chose to not follow the team to fb for personal reasons." Josh Miller has deleted all his tweets prior to January 3rd, but this clarifies his earlier Twitter comments about valuing "loyalty above all." Branch and Potluck will supposedly live on outside of Facebook for, I estimate, six months or less.
Path investors are throwing Day money after Night money, dropping another $25 million into the imaginary social network. The new investors are apparently a bunch of real cupcakes too.
Hack Followup Tabs: Snapchat spam is up sharply, say users. In a brief and characteristically defensive blog post, Snapchat says "As far as we know, this is unrelated to the Find Friends issue we experienced over the holidays," which is just absurd, since the spam is being sent via the still-open API and no doubt using the giant leaked database of active snapchat usernames. No word yet on what Snapchat employees are even doing over there.
Target admitted it had malware on its point-of-sale terminals. Looks like they're focusing on a RAM scraper as the likely attack vector. Neiman Marcus may have suffered the same thing. There is a lot more iceberg here, count on it.
"Meet Freedom Industries, the Company Behind the West Virginia Chemical Spill" in Businessweek, and WVGazette traced Freedom's links all the way back to (who else!) the Koch brothers. This is my surprised face.
Tyra Banks's lovin isn't helping Uber in Paris. GoDaddy partnership with Microsoft Office 365 causes a brief but destructive garbage-web-services vortex. NYC's first bitcoin ATM to debut in some dude's apartment apparently. See Businessweek for a genuine but questionably successful effort at explaining what bitcoin mining actually is. Cool chalkboard art. I find thisGoogle+ comic so terribly, terribly sad for some reason.
Jill Filipovic on "virtual" harassment. Meg McGrath Vaccaro on her life so far in STEM via The Magazine. That diva cup story if you haven't seen it yet. And in case that didn't work, here read this and you'll probably never want to have sex again. Pursuant to Friday's Girls nudity debate tab, Louis Peitzman ran the numbers. My main takeaway is that nudity for purposes of "Fun" is dramatically lacking in my life.
Something Good To Read: Why I bought a house in Detroit for $500.
Today's Song: Neutral Milk Hotel, "Worms" from a 1998 live show in SF
~And the tabs in the wind are beginning to blow~
Today in Tabs is an occasional compendium of wonderful internet content, where "occasional" means daily and "wonderful" mostly means terrible. We were born email but we grew up Newsweek.com. Won't you make Tabs part of your daily outrage regimen?