Yay, I got my Gmail Priority Inbox! Yes, your Gmail can now be divided into "important" and "totally common." This solves all my organization and email response problems, clearly. Why won't totally wholesome and beneficial corporation Gmail provide me with a personal spider monkey that is trained to deal with email?

Have you or your friends had your Gmail accounts hacked for the purposes of shilling Viagra? The good news is that you're not alone. The slightly troubling news is that this mini-epidemic has been ensuing for quite a while in Internet time, and there doesn't really seem to be much news on what, exactly, is going on!

Google's official support forum has a lengthy thread on the hacks, started by someone who felt the pain on April 10:

Checking further I could see someone logged in to my account from Mobile device from brazil and I never use mobile device. Am from India only. Anyway changed [...]

In Marshall McLuhan's prophetic 1964 analysis, Understanding Media, he defines the telephone as "speech without walls." At the end of the 19th century, the new postal system of telephone calls went beyond letters and telegrams to collapse the time and space between two distinct-and simultaneous-voices. Yet within the course of telephonic traffic, lines get jammed. We stare at phones with telepathic (if often futile) fervor, our eyes and mind willing it to ring. Our appetites for attention and news and scandal feed our wish for the phone to ring. As phones grow more digitized and versatile-and, sometimes, less versatile and less simultaneous-our dependence on them means we must [...]

GOD NO NOT GMAIL AGAIN NO GOD WHY!!!!!! Why did we trust you? You said you were the benevolent corporation!

Lately I've been getting the occasional e-mails from MySpace and Friendster, those relics of social networking from a more innocent, Blingee-filled time, asking me to come back to the old hangouts and see what's new. The notes read like half-hearted booty calls filtered through a marketing department, with the vague dread that the old fun times are dead and buried lurking underneath every extra exclamation point. On that note, today comes news that the folks at Microsoft are on the verge of "reinventing Windows Live Hotmail," nipping and tucking the old webmail service in hopes that they can lure back those people who were enticed by Gmail's [...]

*flaps arms, freaks out* UPDATE, 5:24 p.m.: OMG GMAIL IS BACK. I missed it SO MUCH!