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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)

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.

One explanation is simply Fitzpatrick's fickle nature: In his brief career at Six Apart, he vacillated between wanting to retain control of LiveJournal and disclaim responsibility for it — typical if less than noble behavior for a founder after a sale.

There's another reason for Fitzpatrick's new interest that also has to do with his fleeting passions. Before he even knew of Sup's interest in LiveJournal, Fitzpatrick had booked a ticket to fly to Moscow this month. Who travels to Moscow in December? Why, a young man who quickly found a Russian girlfriend to replace Leah Culver, that's who. Now, presented with an advisory gig that gets him tax-deductible booty calls, it's no wonder Fitzpatrick signed right up. (Photoillustration by valiskeogh from Brad's Life)

What the company forgets in introducing the API is that we didn't come to Pownce for its features. We came to hang out with its founders — Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka from Digg, and Valleywide crush object Leah Culver — as well as their equally hard-partying friends. Where's the API for that?

According to Culver, the breakup came over time spent at work — no surprise, given Fitzpatrick's punishing new commute to the Googleplex. Has the attention-seeking engineer gotten press-shy, though? At one time, Culver was disappointed that the start of their relationship didn't merit a post. But at a party in SoMa last night, she told Valleywag editor Owen Thomas that she didn't think the breakup was news. Well, sure, Leah — you and Brad may not be newsworthy, but the punishing drop in pageviews we're about to endure, now that we no longer have our own celebrity geek couple to chronicle? Front page of the business section, baby. Brad 'n' Leah, you have no idea how much we'll miss you when quarterly bonus time rolls around.

"He would have been welcome," says Conde Nast's Kourosh Karimkhany of Swartz. "But I don't think he could have come to the bar. He just turned 20." What is it with big media and their unseemly interest in barely-legal entrepreneurs?

Of drinking age — and deserving of a pint — is cofounder Chris Slowe. Dr. Slowe, that is. Besides the one-year anniversary of the acquisition, he's also celebrating his recently awarded Ph.D. Before I get to hear about his thesis, Leah Culver shows up. The Pownce engineer is bubbly as ever, but she has some bad news — she and Google engineer Brad Fitzpatrick have broken up. (More on that later.)

The evening is capped off, though, with an appearance by Frank Chu, the famous "12,000 Galaxies" signholder of downtown San Francisco. Now he's up to 725,000 galaxies, whatever that means. On that absurd note, I make my exit. Impressive, perhaps, that Reddit has maintained something of its startup vibe a year after its acquisition. Less impressive that free beer, on Conde Nast's tab, is what it took to spur a big geek turnout.

There was no pressure to pass out business cards or pretend to listen to a pitch out of politeness. But the Uncov guys are sly. They have an angle, like everyone else in the Valley. They're running Uncov, advertising-free, just to get attention — and then, when they launch their stealth startup, they're going to milk that attention for everything it's worth. Add to that this guarantee: Their company is the one startup that will never get savaged in Uncov. It's just so cynical it might work.

But besides that hidden scheme, it was just a night out at the bar with your sarcastic know-it-all coworkers. "We're less than 30 years old! Nothing we do now is going to have repercussions in the future!" Uncov writer Ted Dziuba cheerfully slurred towards the end of the night, after the shots of Patron but before he started flashing the shocker in almost every picture he posed for.

Other guests were just as charming. AdBrite salesman Joel Sacks, after trying to steal videographer Sarah Meyers's camera, spilled an entire pint on himself and spent the rest of the night smelling of stale beer. When Meyers pointed her camera towards Friendster and Socializr founder Jonathan Abrams, he pretended he couldn't speak English, mumbling gibberish instead. The chaos was capped off by Forbin Group biz-devver Cindy Phung shouting "Geeks gone wild!" If only.

And of course, there were the haters. "I liked these guys before the started getting on the scene," said one guy by the bar, as if he were complaining that his favorite indie band was picked up by MTV.

Not like the Uncov guys are all that cool, really, when you get right down to it. Dziuba drinks whiskey sours, the same cocktail my 93-year-old grandmother orders on a night on the town. And his wife Julia is adorable and way too hot for him. Watch out, guys: I'm going to be exploring this Silicon Valley phenomenon of the too-hot wife soon.

Speaking of too hot, Pownce engineer Leah Culver was upset that her new relationship with LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick, who plans to celebrate the conclusion of his still-pending divorce next month, didn't merit a Valleywag post. Oh, Leah. If we posted all the things we heard about you, what fun would that be? A lot of fun, actually. "Hot swap," indeed.

–Video by Sarah Meyers

• Pownce is insanely hot. Among the tight-knit set of Web cognoscenti, Kevin Rose's celebrity made Pownce an instant hit and Pownce invitations a scarce commodity. (Like any other scarce commodity, they ended up for sale on eBay.) This was the original impetus for my observation that "Pownce is the new pink": Like Paris Hilton, it's famous for being famous, long before anyone seriously started using it.
• Pownce is not the new Twitter. Twitter is for sending messages. Pownce is more for sending URLs, files, and invitations — things you want to share, not things you want to "share."
• Pownce is a file-sharing service at its core. You've heard of file sharing as a way to get free music, no doubt, and probably heard the convenient myth that these services are meant for sharing files with your friends. (Not that that should matter. Copyright-law novices, take note: Just because you're sharing files with your friends doesn't make republishing a copyrighted work, which is what you're doing when you upload it, any less illegal.) On Pownce, when you're sharing a file with your friends, you're really just sharing it with your friends.
• Pownce is the record industry's worst nightmare. Precisely because the sharing of files is so private and so limited, it's almost impossible to police. Unless the RIAA plans to enlist college students to sign up on Pownce and rat out their new "friends," it's hard to see how record labels will even figure out which of their copyrights are being violated — a necessary step before they can file a copyright complaint.
• Pownce isn't that interesting. It's pretty, well-designed, and functional. But is it really that hard to do any of the things you can do on Pownce?
• Pownce was not created for the reasons its founders claim. I don't buy Pownce's cover story that it was "brought to you by a bunch of geeks who were frustrated trying to send stuff from one cube to another." Pownce cofounder Leah Culver has a more convincing version: That Pownce is an excuse to program a website using some new technologies.

Peron's place, which Culver is renting, is amazing. The backyard is built like a treehouse, with hidden stairways leading to the an outbuilding that doubles as a blacklight garden and hot tub. A model of the Golden Gate bridge serves as a walkway connecting the second floor to the guesthouse. Oh, and there are full-grown pot plants everywhere you turn.

The party had the feel of a high-school kegger, as if Web 2.0 High prom king Kevin Rose had convinced his venture capitalists to go away for the weekend and leave the liquor cabinet stocked. Pownce cofounder Leah Culver danced around the kitchen lip-synching to "Lip Gloss." On a screen, Randi Jayne, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's sister, debuted her latest viral video, a very clever iPhone parody. By 11 p.m., the kegs were kicked, and people stood around holding red plastic cups, hoping in vain for more liquor. Attendees included just about every boldfaced name from the San Francisco Web scene: StumbleUpon's Garrett Camp; Om Malik and Liz Gannes from GigaOm; Sarah Lane, Martin Sargent, and David Prager from Revision3; and recent New York Times profile subject David Ulevitch from OpenDNS.

And of course, there was some drama. A group of wannabe gangbangers walked into the party and, eyewitnesses say, walked out with a MacBook and at least one purse. My purse, to be exact. After I noticed that my purse was missing, three of the alleged thieves came back to the party, apparently hoping to steal more stuff. Partygoers detained one of them, who was then arrested by San Francisco police on a conspiracy charge. Good thing they didn't check out the back yard. For a glimpse of the scene, here's a gallery: