Even those who hate Twitter tend to like the concept of fake Twitter -- that is, false accounts for real people that come off as absurdly plausible, or plausibly absurd.

The best of these can be great satire. The fake Twitter feed of Michael Bay, for example -- whose approach to directing movies seems to be making everything in them bigger, bigger and bigger -- claims that he has just signed on to direct "Slumdog Billionaire." Back in January 2008, the acid postings of @FakeHillary amused the presidential candidate’s traveling press corps with tweets like, “Apparently there is a limit to how much I can say here (I wonder if the male candidates have the same limit?)” And half the fun of following the Twitter feed of @THE_REAL_SHAQ when it first appeared in November was trying to figure out if its author was the actual Phoenix Suns center or not. (It’s Shaquille.)

But now there’s Twitter hacking, a more malicious version of fake content on the site. Today, the microblogging service announced that 33 bona fide accounts, including those of President-elect Barack Obama, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly and singer Britney Spears, had been broken into and defaced with juvenile updates. "i am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today," read the official feed of CNN anchor Rick Sanchez; "Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay," read O'Reilly's page.

Not exactly Jonathan Swift, but the crudeness amused many bloggers, Valleywag among them. Twitter called the matter "a very serious breach of security" and says its support team has identified and disabled the part of its site that failed.