According to Business Insider, "Curtains" is what AskMen.com has dubbed Crowley's old hairstyle (pictured) after stumbling upon it on Flickr, apparently without knowing he was the founder of foursquare, the iPhone social software maker. In an article titled "Hairstyles Women Hate," the men's portal called the cut "a look that's too boyish once you've reached manhood." Fair enough, but Crowley, 33, took the picture when he was a high school senior — you should see the other one — and these days goes with a different look, when he's not keeping his hair buried under hats:

Besides, thanks to Crowley's own software, which helps you summon friends to the local bar, we're sure there will soon be far more embarrassing shots of Crowley floating around out there, if there aren't already.

(Top pic: Dennis Crowley; Bottom pics by See-ming Lee and Scott Beale)

Dot-com address acquisition is a dubious vestige of the first internet boom, when branding reigned supreme over profits and functionality, before entrepreneurs realized people would just look for them on Google. It was also Foursquare's first use of a $1.35 million investment from Fred Wilson's Union Square Ventures and O'Reilly AlphaTech; the software company tells Business Insider it couldn't have switched to foursquare.com from playfoursquare.com without the seed capital.

Investors obviously weren't deterred by the Google theft rumors, either. Some people inside the Googleplex believed Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley launched the iPhone service with code from Dodgeball, which Google bought from him in 2005 and then shut down. Crowley apparently told people at this year's South by Southwest conference the same thing, reasoning that Google wouldn't mind since it wasn't using the code anyway. It seems a safe bet that either Crowley was right or the rumors were wrong, since it's hard to imagine O'Reilly and Union Square Ventures sinking in money if Google were poised to sue.

The incentive to dispose of — or ignore — the issue would have been strong; the iPhone bubble is fast inflating, and your typical venture capitalist hates to be left out of a good hype cycle.

(Pic: Crowley, by See-ming Lee)

MSNBC commentator Dan Abrams inveighed against the horrors of the "mainstream media."

ABC's John Berman played Captain Phillips to his apartment's Somali-pirate rodents.

Techmeme editrix Megan McCarthy questioned California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman's competence.

Web 3.0 fanboy Alan Meckler gave Twitter "big ups."

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley mooched off of ex-employer Google again.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

New York magazine, 2005:

Now that people are breaking up with each other through text messaging, it's only natural that the hottest social-networking program to emerge in recent months is Dodgeball, a free texting service that lets users tell their friends and crushes what bar they're in at any moment so they can meet up. Two recent NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program grads, Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, both 28, launched Dodgeball last spring as an alternative to loud cell-phone calls from bars. When Dodgeball users "check in" at a given locale by sending out a text message, it goes to all their preselected friends, as well as any friends of friends within a ten-block radius. A photo is sent along with the alert-which helps with identifying near strangers. Introductions are made, beer is poured, and then hookups can occur-casually, and in a low-pressure environment, all under the guise of knowing someone in common. It's Friendster, except in real time and in the real world.

(The Friendster comparison proved eerily prescient.)

New York magazine, 2009:

Foursquare is a better Dodgeball, for those who remember the now-defunct social-networking, texting, friend-locating mobile-phone app. The new iteration, rapidly being installed on iPhones across the city, is a fast route to a good night out. Download the app free at playfoursquare.com to track your friends' locations (meaning no more rounds of "Where are you?" texts). It's also a game, with goofy badges awarded to users who check in frequently. And most helpful, members share their ample nightlife experience; according to one enthusiast, the saffron Sazerac at Apotheke is the drink to get.

(Photo by dpstyles)

Some inside the Googleplex believe that Crowley got the code for his new friend-finding startup Foursquare from Dodgeball, the startup he sold to Google for an estimated $40 million in 2005. And after Valleywag reported their suspicions, a source tells us Crowley has been going around telling people at South By Southwest that he did reuse the code, and that he doesn't expect Google will do anything about it.

But that's not what he told Dan Fost of the Los Angeles Times when asked about the charge. Fost credulously printed Crowley's reply:

The code is all brand new. I didn't understand that story. I'm sick as a dog and pasty because I've been holed up for two months writing this stuff.

If only Fost had thought to factcheck that with, say, any of the South By Southwest attendees to whom Crowley confessed. Or with engineers who have inspected Foursquare's code and found elements directly lifted from Dodgeball. That would be work, though — an element curiously missing from much of today's tech journalism.

(Photo by thenextweb)

Watch as microcelebrity NBC contractor Rex Sorgatz attempts to explain Foursquare, a friend-finding interactive game launched by former Google employee Dennis Crowley at the South By Southwest event, an annual excuse for a nonstop party thinly disguised as a conference on all things Web. Carr may be perplexed, but he comes to the right conclusion: Foursquare is a toy for "kids on the Internets."

"Internets," plural! Carr's cool like that!

Sorgatz and Crowley are just two of the familiar microcelebrities who make cameo appearances in Carr's writeup of SXSW. There's Tumblr founder David Karp, bragging about being a slacker:

I didn't even come last year, but this year we dropped the whole team in, I guess as a way of saying that we mean business. We're mostly having fun, doing a few meetings and enjoying seeing old friends. It would probably be a better use of my time to be back home staying up till 4 in the morning and just crushing it to come up with one more application, but this is more fun.

Declaring how much fun one is having and how much work one is avoiding is a strange way of showing one means business, but that's Karp for you.

And look, two Valleywag alumni:

All this can become insular, and fast. On Monday Nick Douglas and Melissa Gira Grant, two veteran bloggers, hosted a session called the "Sex Lives of the Microfamous." The two were involved once, and broke up on Tumblr, or so the story goes.

Actually, I could have sworn those two crazy kids broke up on Valleywag, but what do I know? I'm not quite as old as Carr, but I'm old enough to view faddish kiddie startups like Tumblr and Foursquare with skepticism.

(Video by Richard Blakeley)

Intellectually, that is, as opposed to financially. Most people attending South By Southwest Interactive admit that they're there for the chance to hang out in Austin with the same Internet buddies they hang out with in San Francisco and Brooklyn. Without the parties, what's the point? That's always been the case with South By Southwest. It's just that with the economy prostrate and the social-networking bubble thoroughly popped, there's not even money to skim from the froth.

There's still enough money to pay for tickets to Austin, of course. But in good times and bad, SXSW has always suffered from a lack of purpose. The music and film festival which gave birth to it has real songs and real movies to talk about. The attendees of SXSW Interactive have nothing to look at but each other, and nothing to listen to but their own kind. Surely that explains why it ends up being a group grope of self-congratulation over little at all.

Ah yes, the bubbly parties. Facebook threw a party celebrating the launch of a tool for linking Facebook friends to iPhone apps, completing the circle of two recent technological fads. And Dennis Crowley's Foursquare — which may be based on code he sold to Google, his former employer — facilitated so-called "flash parties" at bars for those who couldn't get on the official party invite lists, or didn't care to wait in line. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, launched Wefollow.com, a directory of users for Twitter, to help navigate the mess of messages broadcast on the service.

In other words, the best and brightest of Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley are working on iterations of existing software for the most frivolous of purposes. There's not even a fundamental innovation in this round of tweaks meant to help you waste time more efficiently. (Gawker Media, the publisher of Gawker and Valleywag, threw a party of its own — but at least my colleagues were open about their intentions, which seemed to involve getting a bunch of geeks liquored up.)

It all reminds me of Camp Cyprus — the group of 20 Web cognoscenti, a gaggle of Facebookers and startuppers and wantrepreneurs who flew to a rich kid's dad's vacation home on the Mediterranean last fall and created a video of them cavorting in swimsuits to celebrate their own brilliance to the tune of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." It was an incredibly tone-deaf gesture at a time when Wall Street was imploding and people were losing their jobs.

Except the economy hasn't gotten any better. And South By Southwest Interactive has more than 10,000 attendees. So doesn't that make its excesses 500 times worse?

A few people had the sense to avoid this particular trainwreck. Ev Williams, the CEO of Twitter, gave it a pass — even though the tech crowd at SXSW did so much to popularize his status-updating service. That the likes of Rose and Crowley are the stars of this year's South By speaks to how far it has fallen.

I first attended South By Southwest a decade ago, when the dotcom boom had 12 months left to run. Mark Cuban, then the head of Broadcast.com, gave a keynote speech about Internet video; he sold his Web-video startup, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo a month later for $5.7 billion. Under Yahoo's ownership, Broadcast.com went on to not be YouTube.

The difference between then and now: Thanks to the delusions of public-market investors, there was actually money to be made from what Internet insiders admitted were inanities. Now there's no money and no hope of making it. There's just the frivolity left.

Videographer Richard Blakeley quizzed bloggers on the highlights and lowlights of this year's South By Southwest.

Scenes from South By Southwest: (photos by Scott Kidder and James Del)

Tumblr founder David Karp has a new Tumblrette, Stephanie Wei! Update: Okay, we've gotten this whole who's-David-Karp-dating thing straight. Stephanie Wei was recently spotted with Karp at a birthday party for Briana Swanson. A tipster explains:

Karp is most definitely dating Stephanie Wei though, to the annoyance of many. Her friends were calling and emailing me asking if he was gay or not a couple of weeks ago, and now they complain that she's always with him.

Karp's sex life sure is confusing!
Pop17's Sarah Austin shows off her intellectual property.

Former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas puckers up to Laughing Squid's Scott Beale.

Lifehacker editor Adam Pash demonstrates how to open a beer bottle with a piece of paper.

Wine Library TV's Gary Vaynerchuk and "friend," which is caption-writer code for "we don't know who this is" very important person Becca Camp.

Facebook employees pop champagne with sparklers, just in case you missed the point that they were drinking champagne.

CollegeHumor's Ricky Van Veen and Tumblr's David Karp attempt to locate South By Southwest's point.

Foursquare bears an unmistakable resemblance to Dodgeball, a cell-phone-based friend-finding service Crowley launched in 2004 and sold to Google in 2005 for an estimated $40 million. Crowley worked at Google for two years afterwards. And his former employer may be getting ready to take legal action, if a tipster is right:

The GOOG has reason to believe that the recently launched location-based service startup Foursquare went live using server code that originally powered Dodgeball. A cease and desist order might be sent out to the service as early as this week. An engineer named Harry could also face some additional discipline.

Dodgeball worked by having users check in via text message when they arrived at a location like a bar or restaurant, and broadcast the user's whereabouts to friends — a precursor of Twitter, in some ways, but focused on people's whereabouts. Google ended up killing Dodgeball (a smart move) but launching a similar service called Google Latitude.

Foursquare's added twist: It turns hanging out with friends into an interactive game, with users racking up points for going out. It also has some au courant features, like an iPhone app and integration with Twitter — the kind of thing any Web app needs to be hip these days. But according to an engineer familiar with Foursquare, its back end appears to bear a strong resemblance to Dodgeball's.

Crowley quit Google in 2007, complaining that Google had stifled Dodgeball. One rumor floating around has it that he tried to buy it back from Google, without success. So it makes sense that he would want to relaunch it, and might feel entitled to use the code he wrote, since Google abandoned it.

It also makes sense that he would have help from the inside. The "Harry" the tipster mentioned is almost certainly Harry Heyman, a Google engineer. Heyman was caught by surprise by his employer's announcement of Dodgeball's shutdown. In January, Heyman wrote on his LiveJournal:

Don't fret too much about not having a tool like this to use when dodgeball gets turned off. Like you, I'm pretty unimpressed with most of the other current offerings, but I know of a couple soon-to-be-released things in the works. Keep an eye out, and we'll all find a new home that suits our needs just fine.

But that's the hitch: Google already paid Crowley for the code, and even though it's not being used, Google's lawyers would reasonably want to disabuse startup founders of the notion that they can sell their startup and have it too.

Crowley and Heyman have not yet responded to emails asking for their side of the story. A Google spokeman promised to look into the matter but has not yet offered comment.

Now would be the perfect time to strike, with Crowley at the South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, surrounded by his friends and fans, many of whom have signed up for Foursquare.

But why? Having taken Google's money for Dodgeball, he gave up the right to have a say in its future. And some startups deserve to die.

Dodgeball enjoyed a brief vogue in 2006 among the early adopters of San Francisco and New York. Quips a person in this set: "Dodgeball died when Twitter took off. Most useful now as a way to see where Andrew Krucoff is getting drunk, or where Rex Sorgatz is getting laid."

For people caught up in the world of Carroll Gardens-to-Mission District microcelebrity, in other words, Dodgeball was a gift. But for Google's hubristic executives, who aim to organize all the world's information, catering to a self-appointed cool-kid set is far too low an ambition. (In 2005, the same year it bought Dodgeball, it also bought a startup called Android; Google is trying to spread the resulting cell-phone operating system into millions of devices.)

Crowley complained that Dodgeball got little support from Google, and noisily quit two years after the sale.

What Crowley, with his entrepreneur's ego, and Dodgeball's self-involved, self-obsessed fans may be too caught up to realize: Google may never have wanted Dodgeball in the first place. Large companies buy smaller ones all the time for a host of reasons: to hire talent, to block rivals from purchasing a company, or even to strangle a threat in the crib. Sometimes, too, they simply make mistakes. (One problem Google has had in integrating startups: Its in-house technology for distributing Web applications across the globe is quirky, and code from outside the Googleplex often requires a complete rewrite before it can work on Google's servers.)

In any event, we're likely to see fewer Dodgeball debacles in Google's future. The market for small Web startups has all but dried up; Google's dealmakers feel less need to swoop in and buy companies lest they go to Microsoft or Yahoo. And Google's informal M&A process, where well-connected early employees could run around with Google's checkbook cutting deals on a whim, is tightening up, we hear. We wonder: Will the Dennis Crowleys of the world be happier if they get to keep their pet projects running, but without Google paying for them?

Acquired in October 2007, Twitter rival Jaiku still doesn't accept new users. Its current ones complain of system slowdowns and malfunctions. On May 30, 2008, founder Jyri Engeström wrote:

Contrary to some voices out there, we DO have plans for future development and we will involve our developer community as much as we can. Just to reiterate, we are working very hard to ensure you have a useful and usable service. We feel the short term pain, too.

Acquired in October 2006, JotSpot is Google Sites now, and according to longtime users, it's not what it used to be.

Purchased in 2005, it took Google six months to assign any new engineers to the project. The founders quit in 2007, and one, Dennis Crowley, will tell any entreprenuer who will listen to reject Google's siren song.

Google acquired GrandCentral, which provides a suite of telephony services, in July 2007, immediately closed it to new users and hasn't opened it since.

Google acquired Measure Map in 2006, hoping to incorporate its features into Google Analytics. "And we did that," reports Google VP David Lawee. Too bad for bloggers who missed Measure Map's blog-specific features and don't use Google's Blogger.

Founder Dennis Crowley, frustrated with the utter lack of support he got while trying to develop the service at Google, finally quit Google (along with Dodgeball's other remaining employee) earlier this month. Hey, maybe someone just unplugged the machine and it'll be back up tomorrow. (Yeah right.) But for now, the few hundred geeks who used this service will have to find something else — Twitter, perhaps? — to announce where they're drinking. Hope they raise a glass to this actually useful service, struck down before its prime.

• New York-based e-mail startup Daily Candy gets a sweet deal: an investment valuing the company at $130 mil, which lets the company take down its "For Sale" sign and get back to the important business of making urban women feel inadequately shoed. [Gawker, link being fixed]
• So some big-city bloggers had a party for Six Apart's new Vox blogging service, right? And some guys sat in a hot tub on the roof? And probably someone called this the bubble? Hon, it's not a bubble until what's in the hot tub can get you drunk. Anyway, click through for topless shots of Gawker Media managing editor Lockhart Steele. [Teen Drama]
• Damn it, Gawker's stealing all the tech news today. As our catty sister notes, the New York Times is proud to name-drop Dodgeball.com founder Dennis Crowley, the man responsible for every New Yorker and San Franciscan constantly updating their friends on how drunk they're about to get. [Gawker]
• Pictured: The Times also uses a photo illustration to remind everyone of those wild days of free drink coasters for all. [NYT]
• Mooching off the "Get a Mac" commercials: You can make a clever parody or a creepy knock-off ad. (Please make the parody.) [iLoad]