Culver is shutting down Pownce, a Twitter knockoff which served as her vehicle for entrepreneurial achievement. Pownce's origins are notable in the way they show that connections rule the funding of startups in Silicon Valley, an industry whose capitalists relentlessly brag about their devotion to meritocracy.

Pownce allowed users to send each other short messages and, most importantly, share files; bootlegging MP3s was a popular if unacknowledged use. But it was more notable for its main backer: Kevin Rose, the languid-eyed founder of social-news site Digg, funded Pownce at a time when one of his employees, Daniel Burka, was dating Culver.

Rose's Web fame lent Pownce Internet-insider buzz; Burka applied his design skills to the site. (Both men moonlighted on the project while working at Digg.) Culver broke up with Burka before the site launched, taking up with Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal, an online diary site which had been purchased by blog-software maker Six Apart.

That relationship didn't last, either. But it brought Culver attention in the right circles. Six Apart is now purchasing Pownce's technology and hiring Culver. This kind of deal, known as an asset acquisition, is typically the least lucrative kind of startup sale, suggesting Culver, Rose, and others involved in Pownce didn't make much money. But at least she got a job where she can prove herself as a programmer, or not, out of the spotlight.

If she's sincere about avoiding fame, Culver will have to reform more than her work life. Granted, San Francisco's pool of straight men is on the small side. But besides Burka and Fitzpatrick, Culver also dated Cal Henderson, an engineering director at Flickr; MG Siegler, a writer at tech blog VentureBeat; and Nick Douglas, a former editor at Valleywag and Gawker. If she doesn't want to be famous, Culver might want to take a look at her relentless technosexuality, which more than hints at the acquisition of influence rather than intimacy as its goal.

Is it sexist to point this out? Perhaps, but not nearly as sexist as touting technical skills while sleeping your way to the top.

Subject: Leah Culver tip
Date: November 25, 2008 8:18:10 AM PST
To: tips@valleywag.comHey guys,

Saw this last night, and it was too good not to send to you.

Leah Culver posted this Tweet around 2AM EST last night:

"leahculver: Left a nice guy, @[REDACTED], for a cheating one, @[ALSO REDACTED, BECAUSE WE CARE]. Oversharing? Probably. Seems like my dating mistakes are already public record."

She has since deleted that Tweet.

More spy photos? Send them in.

Social networks — the kind Henderson and Waldman work on when they're not using them to flirt — are supposed to expand our worlds. Yet these websites' real effect is to shrink them. Who'd want to start anything with anyone who's not already registered on all the same websites you use? The training time to explain the twee etiquette of Web 2.0 is a barrier to entry more fearsome than any Google or Microsoft might dream up. It can only lead to San Francisco's insider scene becoming literally inbred.

(Photo by bees))

And the Battle of the Sexes is on! In one corner, @michaellamb states the obvious: that the woman is getting the press because she's easy on the eyes, not because she's competent. @kimbjo wades in and shows her great vocabulary with this zinger: "And enough woman bashing you misogynist misanthrope." Oh, and for the less literate, she has just accused him of not JUST hating women, but hating ALL humankind! @leahculver joins in that said lady is edu-muh-cated, unlike most Valley CEOs????? (That's a story all by itself, Owen!) Oh, and she can't resist calling him a "jealous sexist asshole." @kimbjo also can't resist comparing the WidgetLab guys to a "disgrunted ex boyfriend," a high school one no less. (You don't have fond high school memories, then?) @skycut then confuses the issue by calling Gina a GUY (perhaps this is a creative attempt at staking out neutral territory). @michaellamb, undaunted by this very serious drubbing from the chicks, comes back and basically says, it isn't that she's a WOMAN, dumbasses; it's that she SCREWED UP. And @emnem follows up with the most beautiful, detailed heartfelt rant against feminism I have ever had the pleasure of reading. To which @raincoaster rejoins that she doesn't fuck her boss and none of her friends do either, and that @emnem must patronize two-bit whores. And @michaellamb makes one last plea: it's what she did, is anybody listening?

Terrific wank; good job everybody, and it's a very sad day when I have to satirize the Valleywag commenters. Please don't make me do this again. Thanks.

And here Mr. Henderson shook my hand and didn't mind at all when I said it was really his longtime companion Tom Coates, part of the Fire Eagle team and old queer hand of the blogosphere, whom I came out to meet. "We're here in my circle of exes," Culver continued. "And I have one to toss back at you," I added.

The rest of the evening is lost in a botched Flip video file sync — no footage for you — and a flurry of text messages wherein I tried to locate the guy getting a handjob in the men's room at the end of the night. No help from Fire Eagle there! Tip me if you know who the lucky jack was? (Photo by Andrew Mager)

1. Robert Scoble
2. Michael Arrington
3. Jack Dorsey
4. Biz Stone
5. Matt Cutts
6. Pete Cashmore
7. Dave Winer
8. Guy Kawasaki
9. Loïc Le Meur
10. Kevin Rose
11. Merlin Mann
12. Stowe Boyd
13. Jeff Atwood
14. Jeremiah Owyang
15. Veronica Belmont
16. Kara Swisher
17. Scott Beale
18. Marc Andreessen
19. Ryan Block
20. David Sifry
21. Emily Chang
22. Om Malik
23. Timothy Ferriss
24. Nick Douglas
25. John Battelle
26. David Cohn
27. Louis Gray
28. Tom Foremski
29. Tim O'Reilly
30. Ariel Waldman
31. Matt Mullenweg
32. Dean Takahashi
33. Philip Kaplan
34. JD Lasica
35. Sarah Lacy
36. Brian Solis
37. Charlene Li
38. Rafe Needleman
39. Dan Farber
40. Howard Rheingold
41. David McClure
42. Margaret Mason
43. Jason Goldman
44. Leah Culver
45. Chris Shipley
46. Jackson West
47. Liz Gannes
48. Owen Thomas
49. Adeo Ressi
50. Max Levchin

(Photo from Michael Arrington)

At the San Francisco Girl Geek Dinner earlier this year, Leah Culver, 25, the developer of Pownce, a microblogging platform, described the extra efforts she's made to convince potential employers that despite being attractive, she's actually, like, competent. "I used to carry around a copy of my computer-science degree in my purse," she said.

I feel for Culver. For years, my wild attractiveness meant I had to work twice as hard to be taken seriously. If I was any uglier, I bet I'd be be CEO of Google by now. Instead, I had to live with the shame that I know how to accessorize and dumb down outfits at job interviews to fit in with the developer slobs in their tees, jeans and sneakers. So I just can't wait to be empowered to become even thinner and more vain by the new reality show about the Nerd Girls of Tufts University. Because what could help attractive people conquer stereotypes faster than television? (Photo by Andrew Mager)

You kidding? Culver knows better than to trust you people. The Pownce founder's new man is Flickr's Cal Henderson, according a tipster who implores us: "Trust me. You don't get a better source outside of Leah or Cal themselves." Another tipster gives us this eyewitness account from the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami:

I expected that Leah Culver story three weeks ago, since she was all over Cal Henderson at the FOWA beach party. In fact, it was so obvious I expected it to be headlining Valleywag the next day, not the Kevin Rose/Julia Allison stuff (which was barely anything).I don't know if any of you were actually at that party, but she was stumbling around following Cal like a little lost puppy, landing occasional kisses and tugging on his shirt to go out to the beach where they did who knows what. It was almost comically blatant.

I tried to hit on Leah Culver at a party not too long ago but that ended in EPIC FAIL. Apparently she was dating Andy Smith from Jaiku at the time. I have no idea if that has changed, but I wouldn't doubt it.

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(Photos by hyku, hyku and MrTopf)

In case you forgot, Pownce is a Twitter clone whose added value is the resale of Amazon S3 space. It's written in Python (Django) by someone who rounds floating point numbers using strings, and is only noteworthy by virtue of being cofounded by Kevin Rose of Digg.

5. Apple TV

Cable TV was going to be dead by Christmas. Instead, Forrester Research reversed its bullish forecast, placing Apple TV behind Jam Packs for GarageBand.

4. Googlephone

Valleywag editor Owen "Wrongway" Thomas repeatedly insisted all year that there was no Googlephone. He was almost right: Google's only built a phone software platform, one which launched with no killer apps or interface innovations. Don't drop your iPhone just yet.

3. Facebook ads

"Once every hundred years, media changes," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg declared moments before unveiling an overhyped ad system for broadcasting your purchases to your friends' Facebook pages. Even if Zuckerberg proves bizarrely right about media, he picked the wrong day. A hundred years from now, the history books — or whatever replaces them —will talk about YouTube instead.

2. DRM-free music

Cory Doctorow is finally happy, but face it: DRM-restricted music and video files weren't the repression of personal freedom that evangelists like Doctorow made them out to be. They're merely irritating when they don't play. Copyright crusaders are like medical marijuana advocates: You can't argue with them in theory, but in practice you know what they really want is the right to party hearty — or in this case, to download music not just free of DRM, but free of charge.

1. Tesla Roadster

The all-electric sports car really would change the mass public's attitude toward electrics. If only it would hit the road. The company missed its promised ship dates, and genius founder Martin Eberhard has been ousted. To be clear, Tesla's basic electric tech works just fine. Gossip says the motor is so strong that it breaks its gearbox. The company has acknowledged that its custom-made two-speed transmissions have proved a problem.

Special Achievement Award: Pownce

Never confuse celebrity with software. Videogenic Digg founder Kevin Rose announced a new company that would do something radically different. Lead developer Leah Culver topped an online beauty contest, despite posting dubious integer-rounding code to her blog. But to date, I still don't even know what Pownce is — NO DON'T TELL ME LA LA LA LA NOT LISTENING! Uncov writer Ted Dziuba explains it for me. As for Pownce's cyberlebrity status, Ted adds, "their daily traffic is now less than 2girsl1cup."

(Illustration by Uncov. Photo of Google Android by Mobile magazine. Photo of Leah Culver by Brian Solis)