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.

If you've already hooked up a Web server to your garage door opener you're waaaaay down the path to madness, so you know, why the hell not build a mobile app to control it?

Sippey should be aware of just how far down the path to madness Fitzpatrick is; the two worked together until last year, when Fitzpatrick left to join Google and Six Apart sold LiveJournal to the Russians.

A couple of months ago Six Apart launched a new initiative that provided custom ad options aimed to offer more engaging ways for brands to interact with content producers and consumers, thanks in part to its acquisition of Apperceptive. Things seemed to have worked well for Six Apart as a result, and the next step for the blogging software creator is a new self-service option for site publishers to add social networking capabilities to their online publications with the upgraded Movable Type Pro (MT Pro).

This combines Movable Type’s blogging platform with social networking features, which is something that many traditional and new media sites have begun to do in the past couple of years for branding purposes and additional engagement with consumers. Many traditional media companies have found this to be a challenging task given the existing crossover audience and lack of integration with publishers’ content for consumers’ purposes.

Now that companies have begun to find more productive ways of interacting with their customers online, Six Apart is capitalizing on this growing necessity with additional social networking tools that can be integrated with the Movable Type blogging platform. This will include things like social media content aggregation capabilities for users, more ways for users to share and contribute items, forums, groups, and more.

I asked Chris Alden, CEO of Six Apart, and a few of his team members how brands are hoping to use any of this user-generated content that’s coming through these newly enhanced blogs and online publications, and he mentioned that things like forums and content aggregation are quite popular, though there may not be a direct way in which brands will be using the content per say. Being part of the conversation, however, is priceless. “Even if it’s sharing content that they find interesting across the Web is contributing content,” said Alden, “aggregating is important for these larger companies. It’s not theoretical anymore. It’s real.”

Along with the new MT Pro launch, Six Apart is also releasing Movable Type 4.2, which is the most recent version of its platform. It comes with a handful of new and improved features, including enhanced performance, simplified default templates for easy “quick start” blogs, and open source TypePad Anti-spam built in.

At one point, Weev says that he's the hacker known as Memphis Two. "Weev says he has access to hundreds of thousands of Social Security numbers," Matt Schwartz writes in the Times piece. "About a month later, he sent me mine." Now Schwartz knows how Six Apart cofounders Ben and Mena Trott feel.

Their Social Security numbers, as well as those of other Six Apart executives and investors, were leaked on the Internet last year. At the time, a tipster told us he believed that Memphis Two, working in conjunction with a Six Apart employee, was responsible. While working on an unrelated story, I received a call from someone who identified themselves as Weev; the caller ID indicated the call came from Technorati, a startup located one block from Six Apart's headquarters. How can such a small world contain such a large hate?

(Photo by Robbie Cooper/New York Times)

Six Apart, the previous owner of LiveJournal before selling it to Russian Internet startup Sup, looks wiser by the day for abdicating the company's iron-fisted rule over what sounds to a non-LiveJournal user like the democratic turmoil in some post-Soviet Central Asian country. Except with more homoerotic Harry Potter fan fiction.

Founder Brad Fitzpatrick, who returned to the advisory board in December after leaving the company in the wake of another user-generated fracas last year, has to be regretting the decision. Not to leave the company, that is, but to agree to rejoin it on the advisory board, which was recently proved toothless by a ham-handed change to LiveJournal's account types. (Users, unbelievably, complained about the elimination of an option for completely advertising-free, unpaid accounts; only in the bizarro financial world of LiveJournal users does this option make economic sense.)

While the affair amounts to bad publicity for LiveJournal — even the developer who wrote the poll code managing the election has called into question voting practices — it's got to be great for pageviews.

Which makes us wonder: Why just let one LiveJournal user onto the advisory board? Sup execs should just turn the asylum over to the inmates, sign an ad-network contract, and step away. Far, far away. Moscow has never been so conveniently distant.

Six Apart's offices seem pretty ordinary to me. Their meeting space is *tiny*. Googleplex's niceties are all about enticing their workers to stay at work longer — yeah, that's real HAWT!. Valleywag offices look like a dump to me.

Click on each company name for its full galleries.

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

• 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)

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
• 
  
• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
• 
  

• Tech's top 10 workspaces
• Tocquigny
• Six Apart
• Pixar
• Netflix
• Googleplex
• Google Zürich
• Gawker Media
• Etsy
• Digg
• IAC

Shellen's going back to his first plan: Running a startup incubator called The Secret Agency. His model: Blogger founder Evan Williams's Obvious, which recently spun off Twitter as its own company.

They endlessly, during the entire existence of LJ promote initiatives, whose only purpouse is to bring harm to LJ, its founders, their goal is to criticize, destablilize and ruin our reputation.

On whether threats to harass advertisers by incensed emos are serious:

Of course not. Where will you find such idiots that will call serious companies? It's one thing to call a newspaper in hope that they will give you 15 minutes of fame on their page. But a proper firm? The first thing you'll get asked is "so who exactly are you trying to reach? What is this about and why the hell should we care?"

Izbrannoe: Let's say I want to start a blog in LJ, but I hate advertising as a concept in our lives and I have no money for a paid account. I can't?

Nosik: Today you will not be able to start a blog in LJ. As you would not, for example, on mail.ru, google, yahoo... There no longer exists an entity on the web, which, without specifically being a charity, would refise to make money - be it from users or from advertising. This is normal, you don't walk into a store and ask for free products.

Let's say, I say to you, mr. Journalist, "I think you put an extra comma here". Your natural reaction is "Oh, you're right" or "Let's ask the editor". But if I come to you and say "Take away the comma or I will beat you." Will you really go checking your spelling after that?

In a situation where people are trying to scare and blackmail us, threatening to destroy our business, there are business reasons for not rewarding such behaviour. This is not just human psychology, which retaliates more the more it is pressed. Problem is that there's never been a successful company whose success was based on bowing to collective resistant forces. No decision — no matter how correct — should be based on pressure.

Specifically, Mullenweg's money. Automattic recently raised $29.5 million in venture capital — bringing its total raised past Six Apart. The Automattic deal was unusual: Some of the money went directly to Mullenweg, and a handful of other employees, instead of to his company. Automattic's investors, in other words, partially bought him out. A failed bidder for Automattic has been going around saying that Mullenweg's personal take was around $20 million.

Why buy Mullenweg out? VCs normally like to keep founders' incentives in line with their own, so everyone's shooting for a big payday. One might think showering a founder with cash ahead of an IPO or acquisition might be a sign that he's valued. Actually, it's the opposite: Making Mullenweg rich before eveyrone else is his investors' way of saying they don't care if he takes a hike.

Mullenweg surely realizes this. As satisfying as it might be to check his bank account, it has to be frustrating to realize he's not deemed relevant to Automattic's future. And that, more than anything, is what must prompt him to lash out at his chief rival.

I keep different people on different social networks, and prefer them safely cordoned off. Have you ever been at a party where two of your exes meet up? Fitzpatrick wants to turn the Web into a 24/7 version of that nightmare scenario. Thanks but no thanks, Brad. Sometimes sharing isn't caring.

I did find it adorable, however, that he included a shoutout to his pals Dave Recordon, a former LiveJournal colleague working on similar projects at Six Apart, and Mischa Spiegelmock, a LiveJournal engineer Fitzpatrick reportedly recruited to Google. In a continuation of their mock feud, Fitzpatrick hacked his friend-finder app to ridicule Recordon's LiveJournal username.

Here's Fitzpatrick's video. I especially love the intro where, like a washed-up actor in an infomercial, Fitzpatrick says, "You may remember me from ...":

1. Facebook stays independent and private, strikes a meaningful deal that legitimizes its business plan, and buys a startup.
2. Born out of the writers' strike, at least one "Funny or Die" style site gets big buzz and maybe even gets bought, but it fails to produce any videos near the quality of FoD or Super Deluxe.
3. Google releases some limited version of voice search beyond GOOG 411. During the year, the company's stock tops $800.
4. Digg sells to a major media company for at least $200 million, and founder Kevin Rose starts a non-web-based company.
5. YouTube announces it's adding HD video, but the feature doesn't arrive until 2009.
6. Gawker Media, publisher of this site, starts a men's site and a Web show.
7. Yahoo suffers major layoffs, leading the press to dub it the next AOL.
8. Yet AOL is spun off and reframes itself. At the end of 2008, the company's future is still uncertain.
9. Apple releases a second-generation iPhone, and at least one New York Times article tries to draw a "middle class/rich" line between those who upgrade and those who stick with the first generation.
10. A new videoblogger emerges as the go-to example for slick independent daily vlogging, following Amanda Congdon and Ze Frank.
11. Tumblr, the pared down blogging service, enjoys the popularity that 2007 brought Twitter.
12. Twitter remains independent and spins off a new service.
13. The Internet again fails to drive one presidential candidate to success. So does Chuck Norris.
14. Jason Calacanis, still running his online directory Mahalo, starts another project.
15. A new meme started in a geeky part of the web infiltrates the "normal" population even more deeply than LOLcats.
16. Yet another e-book reader comes out and no one cares.
17. Blog search engine Technorati collapses after failing to get enough funding to stay afloat.
18. The Wall Street Journal announces it will soon be free online.
19. Blog platform maker Six Apart, having spun off LiveJournal and rearranged its exec staff, gets bought.
20. Dell screws up the good will it won in 2007 with another customer-service or bad-parts scandal.
21. Net Neutrality takes another hit from a telco-friendly Congressional bill.
22. Second Life plods along.
23. The TechCrunch blog network lands a regular TV appearance, if not a show.
24. The country tires of the last round of famous-for-being-famous celebs, and gossip blogger Perez Hilton's TV show gets cancelled.
25. A minor medical incident renews the "can Apple survive without Steve Jobs" argument.

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)

• Robert Scoble does something useful and brings together a bunch of Irish tech entrepreneurs for a drinkfest tonight at 8 p.m. at the Buena Vista Bar at Hyde and Beach in San Francisco. [Scobelizer]
• It's Spontaneous Drinking Night tonight at 7 p.m. at Whiskey Thieves on Geary Street. Join a bunch of tech gadflies who have no other plans for tonight. [Facebook]
• Mediabistro is hosting a holiday party at 111 Minna at 6:30 p.m. Freelance writers unite! [Mediabistro].
• Six Apart throws an "OMG we got rid of LiveJournal!1!!one!!!!"-themed celebration at 6 p.m., also at 111 Minna. Sharing space with Mediabistro's filthy hacks? Talk about your overlapping social graphs. [Facebook

(Photo by Lane Hartwell/Fetching.net)

LiveJournal's boisterous users taxed Six Apart's already stretched management. Fan-fiction writers, whose output was often not for the squeamish, made the site a home. So-called "griefers," apparently dissatisfied with a tightening of site policies, published executives' Social Security numbers. Founder Brad Fitzpatrick noisily quit the company to join Google. Users mocked an ill-conceived advertising campaign by sending then-CEO Barak Berkowitz 527 virtual "gifts" of Diet Pepsi Max icons, defacing his profile.

Berkowitz stepped down in September, replaced by Chris Alden, an executive who ran the company's money- and sense-making business, the paid blogging products TypePad and Movable Type. With the sale of LiveJournal, Alden's reign looks likely to be far less entertaining than Berkowitz's. That's a good thing for Six Apart, if not for gossips.

As for LiveJournal, Sup has made grand promises about respecting the community and appointing an editorial advisory board. Sup already operates the Russian-language version of the site, and is run by Andrew Paulson, an American entrepreneur. But let's be real: This is a company operating in Vladimir Putin's Russia, where the media increasingly is falling under state control, either explicitly or tacitly. One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to find this prospect discomfiting.

Whatever happens to LiveJournal and its users won't be Six Apart's problem. Ben and Mena Trott, Six Apart's founders, are far too polite to say this about their LiveJournal adventure. But they should: "Goodbye, and good riddance."

• The New York Times: Google's Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning
  
• O'Reilly's Radar: Hi5, iLike, Slide, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning and Six Apart
  
• TechCrunch: Orkut, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle
  
• Valleywag: Hi5, Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Ning, Salesforce.com, and Oracle

Guess the only way to find out for sure who's involved is to attend CampFire Thursday night on the Google campus. We would, but we have a thing against CamelCase. But bring us back a s'more, wouldja?

(Photo by russelljsmith)

Highlights of the first day of the conference: Having executives from Six Apart actually speak to me in civil tones; catching up with Loic Le Meur; oh, and getting my ear chewed off by former PodTech CEO John Furrier. See them all in the photo gallery.

(Photos by Randal Alan Smith for Valleywag)

A spinoff would have had financial appeal, of course, given the fad for social networks these days and Facebook's lofty mooted valuation. That is, of course, assuming Six Apart could have come to terms with a deep-pocketed buyer. But taking money off the table is the only aspect of this rumored deal that would have made sense.

First, there's technology. Six Apart executives have long maintained that the company's enterprise and consumer blog businesses complement each other, and share a lot of their core software. (An upcoming version of TypePad, the Web-based blog software popular with small businesses, will have new community features based largely on Vox, we hear.)

Then there's the founders' pride. Would Ben and Mena Trott have supported Movable Type and TypePad, the businesses they built up from scratch? Or would they have thrown their attentions to LiveJournal, the fractious personal-blogging service Six Apart acquired a couple of years ago, and Vox, the newer blog-cum-social network that's especially close to Mena's heart?

And then there's the IPO factor. With its combined businesses, Six Apart's revenue streams are nicely diversified between subscription fees, software licenses, and advertising. And even so, the company is barely big enough to draw investment banks' interest. Separately, its consumer and enterprise arms would have been more acquisition bait than anything.

So for now, a spinoff, having been considered and apparently dismissed some months ago, seems unlikely. But we do know that at least one member of the board is meeting with Alden, the new CEO, tomorrow. We can only wonder what they'll chat about. Anyone heard anything else? Please share. (Illustration by Tim Faulkner)

Leading the charge at the Googleplex, you see, is Recordon's old friend Brad Fitzpatrick, left, who noisily exited Six Apart for Google shortly before Recordon came back to the company. Recordon, in a Twitter, suggests that Google is being less than open by requiring developers to sign nondisclosure agreements before learning about its social-network plans.

The lesson here? One could go on and on about the theory of the "social graph," and open standards, and application programming interfaces. One could talk about the coming war between Google and Facebook over software built on top of social networks. But frankly, that all bores me. I'm more taken by the spectacle of young men who are struggling to design elaborate electronic social networks — and yet could use a bit of help in learning how to maintain the real relationships they want computers to map out for them.