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Not only was there a bit of video lag when the demo-ers tried to pull up NBA highlights, the wireless keyboard that the Google TV people were using during the demo apparently went, pardon the pun, haywire. Perhaps because of all the in-room cellphone action?

More demo problems – not an auspicious beginning for Google TV. There appear to be issues with the remote. Meanwhile we are seeing a news report from MSNBC on "Nicolas Cage's animal sex diet."

Lots of apologies from Mr. Chandra and a request for everyone to turn off their cellphones, which seem to be interrupting the connection between the remote and the TV. Time for Plan B?

The idea would seem to be that one wouldn't need to use their cell phone to Tweet and update their Facebook status with running commentary on whatever was on TV at a given moment — that the integration of everything within the screen would take care of that (and, one presumes, chop the screen up into tiny bits). So the user at home could turn off their cell phone and surrender to the keyboard? That, of course, assumes that said user is actually going to want to have one burning up their laps while trying to lounge on the couch.

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It's also interesting that the big problem with this demo stems from the fact that Google is trying to use a wireless keyboard to control the television, and it keeps going on the blink. Of course, almost no one uses a keyboard to control their televisions, and surfing the Web with a regular remote control will be tough. (Google says its partners are working on new kinds of remotes.)

There was also discussion of how WebTV was "ahead of its time," which is funny to me because I feel like all the attempts at turning the Internet into TV are actually an effort to bring things back — back to an era where content consumption was top-down, where choices were more limited, where audiences were more passive, where executives understood underlying economic models in such a way that they weren't inspired to flail around. And having a tiny Twitter window in the corner of American Idol is not really going to change my perception that any attempt at bringing the Internet and TV into a single entity is a logistical nightmare that invites itself to bad user experiences all around. (Check out Verizon FiOS' attempt to integrate Twitter into its offerings, which makes posting a Tweet into an arduous process that can only be described by 140 characters of expletive-replacements. Brad Stone also brings up the general clunkiness of the interfaces shown off in the demo — and he and I are pretty experienced Internet users.)

Also? There was no talk of how much this brave interconnected world would cost your average everyday consumer. Which I'm going to take as a sign that it'll be "too much."

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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 my password.
Am not sure if this is a bug with gmail or GMAIL SERVER HACKED? I don't know how to report to gmail team ? How can a free account person contact gmail to report these kind of security issue ?

And the problems have persisted since then and spread; the thread is slowly filling with other victims, while my Facebook feed and inbox has been liberally sprinkled with apologies over the hack, which seems to target only a few members of each victim's contact list at a time.

The messages I've received from hacked contacts are pretty minimalist in their sales pitch: There's just an unfamiliar name in the subject line, and a cryptic URL in the body, which one assumes the recipient is more likely to click since the message is coming from someone trusted, or at least "trusted" enough to have the recipient's e-mail address. That URL redirects to a site offering cheap Viagra (of course). And there's proof that the mails were sent from the accounts themselves, and not via spoofed return addresses as often happens with spam; the messages are all in the victims' sent-mail folders, which should reveal that these boner-pill purveyors are not all that interested in covering their tracks.

A friend who had his account compromised over the weekend relayed his story, which is pretty much the same story as the ones posted on the aforelinked help forums, only with added customer-service agita:

When I checked to see the login log, it was normal except for Brazil. I was in and shut it down immediately. I am just paranoid that I won't be able to get back into my account. And you know, Google is useless — you can't call and talk to them.

He changed his password as suggested and flagged the account as compromised — which locked him out of it for 24 hours, making him wonder if he'll even have e-mail when all is said and done. (Surely Google's many server farms can spare him some backup space, but who knows!) It's also worth noting that he only logged into his account from his own computer and his mom's. (He's never used the mobile interface.)

One online security firm is speculating that the hackers are spoofing IP addresses from other countries while engaging in the account-compromising.

The way this is spreading — and the lack of official word on just what, exactly, might be going on — is enough to make you want to go back to the safe haven provided by Elm and Pine! Or, since both those programs seem to be dormant as far as being worked on, a hosting provider with a customer-service department, although now a lot of those places are outsourcing their e-mail services to Google too. So I guess just change your password for now and hope for the best?

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The whole "liveblogging" directive, though, was sort of odd, and not only because of the apt etiquette tip she gave out in a recent ad for Macy's. (It's "No Tweeting while eating"; one audience member asked her to utter it in the post-show Q & A scrum.) For one thing, the show was actually taped days in advance of its airing, meaning that all those #thetechshow-tagged Tweets were coming ahead of any regular old Martha viewers being able to follow along with them. And thanks to the screens in front of them, the audience seemed oddly distracted, trying to get on the studio's overloaded wireless connection and angling to appear on camera, even if it was only via icon-when they weren't staring at their devices, as captured nicely by this photo by Amy Oztan.

Not to mention that the Internet, despite its being confined to screens, is not the most televisual of mediums. The depiction of its non-streaming-video aspects on TV and in the movies hasn't evolved much since Sandra Bullock had her identity stolen in The Net-look at the screen, cock your head in a "concerned" way, maybe mouth along with what you're typing. Much of the show was like that, particularly a segment with a Yahoo!-employed talking head who made much of her stay-at-home-mom bona fides as she ran through her parent company's latest iteration of the portal concept. (The more things change....)

Twitter was the show's main focus, with three of its seven taped segments given over to it. Martha is a fairly active Tweeter-she noted during her powwow with co-founder Biz Stone that her 1.5 million-plus followers make her the 38th-most-popular member of the service, not that she's counting-and she's a great example of how the 2009 version of the Internet has hyper-compressed plain old celebrity culture. She posts brief updates on her dogs' health and truncated recipes, receiving replies from people who follow her empire. It's a low-risk, medium-reward proposition, and Twitter has relished its embrace by the star set, even going so far as to recommend famous peoples' accounts to follow to brand-new users. Meanwhile, the replies received by Stewart (and the other members of her galaxy) are the Web 2.no version of the fan letter, usually with trifling details about the non-famous person edited out and the agape adoration kept in.

That's not to say that the whole show was filled with bubble-borne puffery, though. In the first segment, Stewart cocked her eyebrow and bluntly asked Stone about Twitter's recent billion-dollar valuation. (I pretty much fell in love with her at this point.) Instead of being bowled over by This Thing Called The Internet, as so many other talk-show hosts might, Stewart exhibited more skepticism than 99% of the business reporters and other so-called "experts" out there, some of whom have tried to garner attention for themselves with claims that the microblogging service is really worth five to 10 times that. Of course, this could be in part because Stewart's a mogul in her own right, and she's acutely aware that her own company-which, you know, has actual revenue-generating arms-has a market cap at around one-fifth Twitter's.

So aside from freeing up money that might be spent on celebrity publicists, how exactly does Twitter's value come into play? Martha and Biz did bring up the service's parallels with Google, which was also seen as a probable money pit back in the day. But timing here is important, and in a society where people seem to be increasingly averse to ponying up for information, a service that relies on disseminating news in the briefest way possible seems to be something of a losing proposition for the long term. (Perhaps Twitter will become the new fan club?)

Revenue stream or no, Martha further showed her savvy when she told the cameras what her next show would be about: unplugging and heading into the great outdoors.

Maura Johnston is the editor of Idolator and the pop critic for NPR's Weekend All Things Considered. She has been on the Internet longer than you.

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[Andrew Kipple] denied complaints that the photos — many of which attract a string of snarky comments from readers — single out people because they are poor or unattractive.

"If you make a bad decision on what you're going to be out in public wearing, that's what we're looking for," he said. "If you're 400 pounds, you shouldn't be wearing nothing but a pink tube top. Even if you shop at Goodwill, wherever you go, the shirts they sell have sleeves and they have your size."

Adam Kipple, who works as a Web designer for a marketing firm, said he and his brother are frequent Wal-Mart shoppers themselves and that, in a way, their site could be boon to the shopping chain.

"People [who send e-mails wanting to take pictures] say, 'I haven't been to Wal-Mart in years, but now I have a reason to go,' " he said.

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