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.

It's obvious what's in it for the magazines which write about them. Rose makes a compelling story, even if Inc. had to resort to ridiculous hyperbole:

Rose has managed to put himself at the center of an ever-expanding new-media empire. In addition to Revision3 and Digg, he recently launched an Internet messaging service called Pownce. Thanks to Rose's star power and a well-designed website, Pownce quickly attracted more than 150,000 people, who use it to share music, videos, and links with their friends. This means Rose owns an online newspaper, an online television network, and an online communications platform.

Ladies and gentlemen, geeks of the world, please welcome Kevin Rose. He is the first vertically integrated Internet celebrity — part Steve Jobs, part Howard Stern — and the next media mogul.

Wait a second: Revision3, Rose's "online television network," is mostly a vehicle for distributing videos where Rose chugs beer with Albrecht and discusses Digg headlines. It just laid off several employees and canceled five shows. Pownce is barely known outside of San Francisco — and its insidery core of users know that it's secretly a great way to swap copyrighted music and video files without getting threatening letters from the RIAA. And Digg?

Well, Digg just raised $28.7 million in venture capital, after several rounds of acquisition talks with Current, News Corp., and Google went nowhere. Digg needs to get big — which means Rose needs to change his image.

He's always been the beer-drinking slacker who started Digg on a whim, and never wanted to run a big company. That story no longer works. Instead of believing in the wisdom of crowds, Rose needs to run from it. His tech-geek fan base isn't large enough to take Digg into the territory where an IPO is plausible.

Burnt by a goofy BusinessWeek cover that made him look like a joke, Rose has stayed away from print. But now he needs the mainstream media as much as they need him. Coverage in second-tier publications like 7x7 and Inc. lead to more, higher-profile stories.

Will editors in New York's high-rise offices ask pesky questions about Pownce and Revision3? No, they'll just read his clips, and think Rose really is the next Howard Stern. In that future path lies true stardom, not just Internet fame, and real riches, not just paper ones. But it means abandoning the ideals which led him to start Digg in the first place.

More spy photos? Send them in.

According to new stats from Hitwise, Plurk, the least cool microblogging startup around, might have the last laugh. Its Web traffic far exceeds FriendFeed's and Pownce's. And yet Twitter, while growing very fast, itself isn't very large. Its imitators are all so small, really, as to barely deserve mention, let alone magazine covers. Microblogging isn't just about very short updates. It's about very small businesses. If I wrote about them in line with their actual worth, this post would have been far shorter than 140 characters.

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)

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"
• L is for Levchin, who never goes slow
• P is for Parker, the Valley's bad boy

Basically, they've been all over each other the entire time here. A friend almost got a pic of the two walking together alone but came out too dark to tell what was going on. We did see them walking alone to the beach though. The club/cafe Nikki Beach in South Beach has been their breeding ground. Ask anyone who's been there for the beach party and they'll likely confirm.

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.

Pownce, despite being a shitty service, gives us some insight into the Web 2.0 world. I have described this before, but it is best done with imagery:

• Useless service X is released after 2 months of MySQL/CSS development.
• Arrington covers it, thousands of users sign up. Mike takes his ad revenue.
• People either stop giving a shit or realize your service does not solve any problems for them.
• Fail.

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)

Anker, LiveJournal founder Fitzpatrick, Sup CEO Andrew Paulson and some of his Russian engineers, a passel of Six Aparters, and one slightly bewildered goat held a bash at 111 Minna to celebrate the split. Also there: Fitzpatrick's omnipresent ex, Pownce engineer Leah Culver. Culver was in good spirits, though, despite the rumor Fitzpatrick's seeing someone in Russia. She too has a new beau, Justin.tv's Kyle Vogt. We're just waiting for the inevitable Leahcast.

Culver wasn't the only camera-friendly type there. Natali Del Conte, CNET's newly hired TV personality, stole the spotlight with a sparkling appearance just as I was leaving 111 Minna.