• Alan Levy (BlogTalkRadio)
• Alec Oxenford (OLX, DineroMail)
• Alejandro Estrada (DineroMail)
• Alexis Bonte (Erepublik.com)
• Andrew McLaughlin (Google)
• Anil de Mello (Mobuzz)
• Arturo J. Paniagua (Hipertextual)
• Auren Hoffman (Rapleaf)
• Axel Schmiegelow (Sevenload, Denkwerk Group)
• Benjamí Villoslada (Menèame)
• Brent Hoberman (Mydeco)
• Carlos Martìn (IG Expansiòn)
• Cedric Maloux
• Christophe F. Maire (Nokia gate5, investor)
• Claudia Gisiger-Gonzalez (UNHCR)
• Dan Dubno (Blowing Things Up)
• David Sifry (Technorati)
• Demian M. Bellumio (Cyloop)
• Eduardo Arcos (Hipertextual)
• Efe Cakarel (The Auteurs)
• Ehssan Dariani (studiVZ)
• Esteban Sosnik
• Esther Dyson (EDventure)
• Felix Petersen (Plazes)
• Hans Peter Brøndmo (Plum)
• Ibrahim Evsan (Sevenload)
• Ivan Communod (Vpod.tv)
• Jacob Hsu (Symbio)
• James Gutierrez (Progress Financial)
• Jennifer L. Schenker (BusinessWeek)
• John Markoff (The New York Times)
• Joichi Ito (Creative Commons, Six Apart Japan, investor)
• Jon Berrojalbiz (Trading Motion)
• Jonas Birgersson (Labs2)
• Jörg Rohleder (Vanity Fair)
• José María Figueres (Grupo Felipe IV)
• Jose Marin (IG Expansion)
• Julio Alonso (Weblogs SL)
• Lars Hinrichs (XING)
• Loïc Le Meur (Seesmic)
• Louise T Blouin MacBain (Louise Blouin Media)
• Lukasz Gadowski (Spreadshirt.com, investor)
• Lukasz Wejchert (Onet.pl)
• Marc Samwer (European Founders Fund)
• Marcelo Claure (Brightstar Corp.)
• Marko Ahtisaari (Blyk, Dopplr, FON)
• Mathias Entenmann (Betfair)
• Matt Biddulph (Dopplr)
• Megan Smith (Google)
• Michael Arrington (Techcrunch)
• Michael Jackson (Mangrove Capital Partners)
• Michael Wolf (Farallon Point)
• Nikesh Arora (Google)
• Ola Ahlvarsson (Result, FON)
• Om Malik (Giga Omni Media)
• R.J. Friedlander (Grupo Planeta)
• Ricardo Galli (Menéame)
• Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz (Vpod.tv)
• Rupert Schäfer (DLD, Hubert Burda Media)
• Scott Rafer (Lookery, Mashery, Winksite)
• Tariq Krim (Netvibes)
• Thomas Crampton (Next Media)

Probably the biggest surprise last night was that despite Facebook's busy day announcing new features to allow users to spam each other, one of the company's Harvard connections still showed at last night's Founders Club party here in New York. Which one? ConnectU founder and litigious claimant to the Facebook throne, Divya Narendra, of course.

What, you were expecting Adidas? I asked Narendra what he really thinks of Zuckerberg, but he wouldn't. Didn't want to piss off his lawyers. Narendra was happy to dish on fellow wannabe Facebook founder Aaron Greenspan, however.

"I have no idea how he got that New York Times article," Narendra told me. "He has nothing to do with any of this."

Bitches just jealous.

New York angel investor Ron Conway also turned up last night. I'd have snapped a photo of him, but for a big fella, the man pulls a mean pirouette at the sight of a camera. And did you really want to see a photo of his backside? Silicon Alley wantrepreneurs are not allowed to answer that.

One thing I didn't know about Adelson: Apparently he lives in Dutchess County, north of New York, and commutes to San Francisco to run Digg. Does this mean we can claim him for Silicon Alley? (Ed.'s note: No.)

CollegeHumor's Zach Klein and Ricky Van Veen also showed, dragging down the whole affair with their ironic style and funny-looking glasses. They only cost $7 dollars on eBay. Father figures Josh Mohrer of BustedTees and Vimeo's Jonathan Marcus mostly managed to keep the boys in line, though dress code violations (sneakers) barred the entire crew from the Rainbow Room afterparty. Nobody said beauty was easy, fellas.

In fact, it is a scam. I'm not saying wine is totally useless and that no one likes it ... but I am saying that the great majority of people that like wine, like it because so many other people around them like wine. In this case, the Emperor might have some cloths, but it ain't more than a speedo and some sandals.

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

A directory on its face, MerchantCircle at its root, it is a cynical, poorly-conceived search-engine-optimization play using deceptive techniques to harvest business data. MerchantCircle is notorious for autodialing merchants to build its database. The recorded message tries to dupe merchants into entering their data with the lie that someone has left a bad review. It's a classic bait-and-switch not unlike Rapleaf's "someone has searched for you" emails. Hoffman's new buddies have used this technique for at least a year despite numerous complaints.

MerchantCircle's response, like Hoffman's has been to pay lip service to its critics. Entrepreneur John Battelle contacted CEO Ben Smith a year ago. Smith promised to address the deceptive practice but — surprise, surprise — MerchantCircle continues the spam-calling to this day.

And Auren Hoffman can't plead ignorance to MerchantCircle's behavior. He has been prominently listed as an advisor to the company for quite some time.

How will Hoffman spin this one? His words promise one thing. His actions, quite another. As in the real world, one's reputation is best judged not by what one says, but by the company one keeps.

Hoffman, of course, is being perfectly cycnical in claiming he's trying to protect users' interests, rather than profiting from them. Of course, it's not clear whether or not this Bill of Rights would allow Rapleaf's TrustFuse to profit from selling that individually-owned data. But that's the beauty of such lofty, high-minded Web manifestos: They count for nothing but the appearance of good intentions.

Rapleaf began as a competition to eBay's reputation ratings. Rather than being tied to eBay's auctions, though, Rapleaf would track an individual's reputation universally, online and offline. Reputation ratings have been a valuable resource, but proprietary to eBay. The idea of a rating which would apply both to the Web and the real world was well-received — except by eBay, which banned Rapleaf's nascent service last year.

But at its launch, its chances of success were pegged to getting other consumer websites to use its rating system, rather than just relying on user comments and ratings. A year later, it has attracted a few meaningless partners — and evolved into something less reputable than a reputation tracker. Rapleaf has devolved from the lofty category of "reputation tracker" into a "people search" site — a thoroughly sleazy category that includes sites like Spock and PeekYou.

Hoffman further muddied the waters by introducing a couple of subsidiary services to Rapleaf. UpScoop, a product that mines all of your email contacts and tells you what social networks they belong to, launched in January. Rapleaf bills UpScoop as a "fun, free service," but it primarily harvests new emails for Rapleaf to index. It certainly does little to bolster Rapleaf's goal "to make it more profitable to be ethical."

Indeed, some charge that Hoffman is making Rapleaf more profitable by being unethical. His latest service is TrustFuse, which sells Rapleaf demographic data to marketers. When CNET recently ran a story on Rapleaf and TrustFuse, Hoffman killed the TrustFuse website and altered RapLeaf's privacy policy. But TrustFuse, as a service, quietly lives on.

So Rapleaf is not really an online destination where people go to evaluate the reputations of business partners. Rather, it is a honeypot using Rapleaf and UpScoop to lure people in and harvest personal data to be sold through TrustFuse — all thanks to Hoffman's once lofty, now rapidly diminishing reputation in the Internet business.

Here's the pitch:

Recently, you guys ran a piece comparing Google versus Yelp, and while Yelp gets a lot of 'cool' buzz, they only reach a few big cities and have not captured the practical, business side of the puzzle. MerchantCircle (one word) is about to announce tomorrow that we've passed 200,000 local small business owners signed-up. That number makes us the leader in a space that everyone is trying to get a piece of right now.

We have more merchants than Google, Yahoo Local, CitySearch, Insider Pages and any other local directory site you can think of.

Well, that's nice. Suspect, but nice. But then we started digging.

• MerchantCircle might have businesses listed, but it has practically no users. Site traffic, according to Compete.com, is a fraction of the nearest competitor's.
• No wonder: It's theoretically possible to browse the directory of listings, but the MerchantCircle site itself is designed as a roach motel for merchants.
• The boasted merchant listings are questionable. Many appear to be prepopulated from databases, or possibly "scraped" — copied wholesale — from other sites. Take this listing of San Francisco restaurants, for example: Most have little more than addresses.
• MerchantCircle appears to be using automated systems to cold-call local merchants. Like Yelp, MerchantCircle touts user ratings as a reason for businesses to sign up for the site. But unlike Yelp, MerchantCircle isn't waiting for there to be any actual user reviews. For some time, MerchantCircle has been autodialing businesses in an effort to convince them that users may have left bad ratings about them on the site. Never mind that the reviews — and the users — may not exist in every case. For local businesses, which rely on the phone to attract customers and make sales, autodialing is a thousand times worse than email spam; wasting time with an automated system is the same, in their minds, as taking money from their pockets. Lying is just the icing on the cake.
• MerchantCircle CEO Ben Smith promised to stop the autodialing — but it's continued. John Battelle, founder of the Federated Media online-ad network, contacted Smith about the practice in September 2006. Smith claimed "that he's on it." According to the comments businesses are still leaving on blog posts about MerchantCircle, the practice continues to this day.
• The company is counting on search-engine optimization, or SEO — the art of tweaking websites to make them rank highly in search results — for traffic. So far, it's failed. But even if MerchantCircle's attempts at SEO worked, Google and the other search engines would rapidly catch on and banish MerchantCircle's pages from their indexes.

MerchantCircle's business model has evolved into a circle jerk: Rather than persuading actual users to visit its listings, MerchantCircle is styling itself as a social network for local businesses which link to each other's profiles on the site. But if you ran a local shop, would you rather raise your profile with the Chamber of Commerce, or get actual customers in the door? As with any such arrangement, this circle is likely to leave local businesses exhausted and unsatisfied.

Which raises the question, why are Valley notables giving this company a hand? Among the company's investors and advisors are Scale Venture Partners, Disney's Steamboat Ventures, Ron Conway of Angel Investors, Auren Hoffman of Rapleaf, and — ironically enough — Chas Edwards, a vice president at Federated Media. His boss, Battelle, must be so proud.

Georgevalidates that men are oftentimes clueless to the ways of feminine hygiene. Re: Google Exec Marissa Mayer's Newsweek spread:

Why is she wearing so much makeup? She's naturally pretty, she's doesn't need to have some prissy hairstyle and three layers of makeup.

David Quiec comments on Weird Al's new "White and Nerdy" video:

Is it me, or is Weird Al skinnier?

ResearchZilla reacts to the news that Auren Hoffman used his guest gig for Venture Beat as an opportunity to rip Evite a new one while plugging the startup he invested in. RZ, you can go ahead and start one for us:

Btw, when are YOU gonna start a valleywag social network? Get on the bandwagon man..you could be making so much more money offa your readers.

Dead nerdy geeks were vain too, at least according to Pb:

Newton? Yeah buddy, that's his own hair. Neal Stephenson's The System of the World devotes many a passage to Sir Isaac's lush locks, even in his gray years.

BarelyFitz shows no
Google love:

Now that [Google rival] Baidu is bringing the tremendous benefits of universal information access to China, perhaps Google should leave the country and stop being evil.

and Re: VP Marissa Mayer:

Is she voiced by Mel Blanc? (with that laugh it's a definite possibility)

And finally, Mjlambie confirms the Nick Douglas/TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington lovefest:

Looks like MA gave you a little shoutout in his post. you guys are really starting to bond? Tahoe fishing trip weekend anytime soon?

I'll admit that Evite is one of the greatest viral sites the world has ever known. Yet it is absolutely horrible.

And spent seven paragraphs tearing the site apart before mentioning this:

But you know what, there may be an alternative. Recently I received few invites via Socializr, as I am part of their gamma program. I love this site (disclaimer: I am an investor and a friend of the founder). I hope and pray they kill Evite.

It's like George W. Bush writing on the front page of the Washington Post, "Democrats eat their young (disclaimer: I am a Republican)." There's nothing wrong with letting a guest write a blog post — just don't let them dress up a PR piece as independent news. Readers will see right through it.

Why I hate Evite [Venture Beat]