It's been a rough week for celebrities. With last week's passing of Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and Billy Mays, Twitter has been slammed with RIP messages and general discussion about the life and times of some of the world's most famous celebrities. Sprinkled in with the legitimate death reports, however, have been plenty of fake ones, culminating today in a hack-attack on the microblogging platform that comprimised the accounts of Diddy, Britney, and Ellen.

Hot on the heels of the Michael Jackson death reports, actor Jeff Goldblum was the first to have his death erroneously reported on Twitter. RT's quickly circulated claiming that the actor had fallen to his death while filming a new movie. Astute Twitterers, however, were quick to discover that the death reports were a hoax, and quick to point out that although the actor himself had not fallen to his death, his career in recent years had.

Then, just today, a post to Britney Spears' Twitter account via image-sharing web-service TwitPic stated that the musician had passed away. The tweet was caught before it spread too far, but some Twitter users shared the link nonetheless. Later it was confirmed that P. Diddy and Ellen Degeneres' Twitter accounts had also been compromised, presumably as part of the same attack.

It's important to note that Spears' account seems to have been hacked via Twitpic. not directly via Twitter itself. That may seem to be a small distinction, but it's likely to become a larger and larger one as the proliferation of web-based Twitter applications continues.