Heller doesn't disclose it in her Huffington Post article or bio, but she was until recently an editor at the site, we hear. A spokesperson for the website writes under a CityFile post that Heller is no longer with the company, but that hardly washes away a major source of bias. Then again, conflicts of interest are part of the magical fuel that helps drive the Huffington Post. No writer really works for free.

UPDATE: A tipster writes to inform us that, behind the A Small World firewall, Heller is still listed as editor in chief of A Small Magazine. The site has given the magazine less prominence on A Small World's home page, our tipster adds, after a "disastrous" article on "Young Power Couples," which prompted A Small World co-founder Louise Wachtmeister to comment as follows:

An all time low!

Not like the old days, discrete and understated.

I sadly state this and I am a co-founder of ASW .

I am embarrassed and want to state that I have nothing to do with this. If I was the editor, I would listen to feedback, not criticize it, and in some cases apologize to the members.

Louise

(Pic via Starworks)

Weinstein needed money fast for his troubled movie business. How to pawn his flailing A Small World website for rich people off on Vogt? With a little negging, judging from what Vogt told the Huffington Post:

We met at the AMFAR benefit in Cannes last year. I walked up to him and said, "Hey, I want to buy your shares in ASMALLWORLD" to which he responded, "you need to show up with a lot of money, which I don't think you have." I laughed and said, "I think I have ten times more than you do."

Then he bought the website, and proved to Weinstein that he wasn't some unimportant poor person. Who's laughing now, Weinstein?

[via Guest of a Guest]

(Pic via)

Two years ago, the Times was quoting the same sort of fabulous young people saying that a different teeny-tiny social network, Harvey Weinstein's A Small World, was going to be the cool new thing. But traffic quickly flatlined, and Weinstein earlier this month finally relinquished his stake in the disappointing property.

Foursquare, admittedly, seems slightly more interesting: It has an innovative, GPS-based "check-in" technology that allows you to register your location; and like Twitter in its early days it has caught on among the hipster dot-com digerati. But its 60,000 users are nothing to brag about, and there are some interesting parallels between how it and A Small World were packaged in the Times:

Picture of worldly young women? Check.

• Foursqaure: "Emily Woolf, far right, uses, Foursquare.... to find her friends when she wants to meet."
  
• A Small World: "Laura Rubin, a brand consultant and fashion publicist.... combed [the site] for guests to attend a fashion party in the glass-enclosed penthouse of Hotel on Rivington on the Lower East Side."

• Foursquare: "Supersize services like Facebook and Twitter... have millions of members... [Foursquare] is not yet cluttered with celebrities, nosy mothers-in-law or annoying co-workers."
  
• A Small World: "Sleeker than MySpace or Facebook, aSmallWorld.net is not the type of site where one is likely to come across videos of amateur motorcycle stunts or girls in bikinis."

• Foursquare: "At this point, I don't even bother texting or calling my friends. I just check Foursquare to see if they're nearby and go meet them." —Emily Woolf, 24. "On Twitter, there are more than 3,000 people that follow me... Foursquare is more the people that I actually want to hang out with." —Annie Heckenberger, 36.
  
• A Small World: "In reply to a query from a comely young woman searching for a hairdresser in Singapore, a Procter & Gamble executive there responded with a thinly veiled proposition: 'I have two bottles of Nice n' Easy in the cupboard. I'll do it for free.'"

• Foursquare: "One factor that might help Foursquare retain its intimate feel is that most of its members... many urbanites in their 20s and 30s.... are picky about who can see the real-time footprints that they are leaving across the cities in which they live."
  
• A Small World: "The site functions much like an inscrutable co-op board: its members, who pay no fee, induct newcomers on the basis of education, profession and most important, their network of personal contacts."

Foursquare: Everyone goes there, because it's not crowded.

Weinstein Co. will offload its majority stake in ASmallWorld.net to mogul Patrick Liotard-Vogt, scion of the family that started Nestle Corp., sources tell the Times. There's no word on the price.

But there's every reason to think it will be depressed. A Small World was movie honcho Harvey Weinstein's first internet investment, and it soured quickly: Fully a year and a half ago, the VIP members were already complaining about emails pestering them to log on to the site and about the increased ads. Traffic has remained flat for years, while Facebook soared. The problem was fundamental: Rich guys don't want to socialize only with one another, and once you let in enough attractive young women and such your VIP site loses it cachet and everyone might as well just hang out on Facebook, which Metcalfe's law teaches us is exponentially more useful anyway.

Not that Weinstein suddenly realized any of this; he's cutting his losses only now that circumstances have forced him to, and probably at a fire-sale price. At least now he can focus on trying to save his flailing movie company. The members of a Small World have plenty of other ways to entertain themselves.

A Small World can start charging for introductions, as some dating sites do. But if it helps arrange the wrong kind of hookup, it could potentially run afoul of pimping and pandering laws. Or it could prudishly kick socioeconomically unqualified women off the site and risk losing the male users who love them (for at least as long as their money holds out).

Valleywag's solution? Far from shooing women without their own trust funds off the site, A Small World should let them stay. Better yet, have them invite suitable friends, and let them join A Small World for free. Meanwhile, charge the men healthy fees for membership, and let users continue to make discreet arrangements between consenting adults. Everyone wins!