Thank you, Julia Allison! The Internet's best self-promoter has uncovered evidence that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is still girlfriended by Andrea Weckerle, a social-media PR rep he turned to after the messy breakup of his affair with maple-leaf-waving right-wing punditrix Rachel Marsden. We'd heard they'd call things off, but they seem very much the couple here. Allison generously offered not to post the photo, to spare the couple the "recent ... um ... media attention they've endured." Instead, they jumped at the chance for more publicity. We're delighted to hear Wales is not wanting for female companionship, but Weckerle should watch her back around Allison.Wales has edited Julia Allison's Wikipedia entry — and we all know what that can lead to. Can you add to the sum of all human knowledge with a clever, yet printable, caption? If so, leave it in the comments. The best one will become the post's new headline. Friday's winner: theodp for the "$100 million flipper." (Photo via NonSociety)

For quippy superstar engineer Cal Henderson, the fellow who has kept Flickr from crashing all these years, attendance at Yahoo's Hack Day developer event was all but mandatory, since he works there. But what attracted Pownce cofounder Leah Culver, Henderson's ex-girlfriend? A Valleywag tipster's spy camera caught the two of them hard at work, laptops side by side. All business, clearly — until it came time for the awkward parting hug, and perhaps more. "Looked like they were kissing in the pic with him holding her, but can't say it looked very enthusiastic or romantic," our tipster analyzes. Full photos below, so you, too, can interpret the body language in the comments.

Our apologies to Ms. Ariel Waldman — she is not dating Cal Henderson: "I need dates — stop ruining my game, yo," she Twitters. Good, because that would make for some awkward meetings at Pownce, where she spends time as a community manager working with cofounder Leah Culver, a former Henderson paramour. This also means that polytalented Flickr code jock Cal Henderson is probably available. Probably. "How did Valleywag miss the girl I was actually there with?" he later asked us.

In what appears to be about the exact philosophical opposite to the public relationship performance art piece perpetrated by Julia Allison and Jakob Lodwick last year, serial conference speaker Chris Messina and new girlfriend Brynn Evans have explained their much geekier obsession with tracking their relationship metrics online — privately. It's a neat way to convince a reporter that you're on the bleeding edge of Web-era relationships. Something Messina has done very successfully over the years.Rather than rely on romantic intuition (which Messina all but admits horribly failed him in his last relationship with fellow conference-speaking professional Tara Hunt), the two are now trying to suss out behavioral patterns that might indicate a cooling of interest. How do they do it? With websites that just happen to be eager for publicity.

Cofounder of Ximian, which sold to Novell back in 2003, Nat Friedman has been busy at the new parent company as the chief of technology and strategy for the company's open source projects. But that hasn't kept him from a social life, as his recent announcement of an engagement to the lovely Stephanie will attest. Here, Nat and Stephanie lounge on a gondola in Venice — what could be more romantic? Anyway, sorry ladies, you'll have to find yourselves your own knight in Linux-powered armor. [Nat Friedman]

Another failed relationship, another awkward online parting of ways for Jimmy Wales, the cofounder of Wikipedia. Just a few months ago, he was squiring new-agey PR impresario Andrea Weckerle, a self-described "global nomad," around the world. Now, insiders say, Weckerle has dumped Wales — you can tell, because she no longer follows his Twitter updates. The puzzle here: How does he put so much energy into chasing women when he's supposedly leading the world's largest collection of unfactchecked assertions backed up by hyperlinks, and taking on Google with Wikia, his for-profit offshoot?Oh, right — because he's not doing any of his jobs well. Sue Gardner, the executive director of Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, has made it clear she's running the show there. And Wikia? Its search engine, the project on which Wales has said he's focusing his energies, has 0.000079 percent of the market. The common thread: Wales is incapable of sustained attention on anything, or anyone. He once signaled his coupledom by tweeting thanks to an admirer from "Andrea and I." Weckerle has left a coded retort for Wales with this quote from Roy Disney: "It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are." Not as rough a farewell as Rachel Marsden, the conservative Canadian pundit. She auctioned Wales's clothes on eBay after he posted a note on Wikipedia stating that they were no longer an item. Too much trouble, too much effort, for Wales to repeat that kind of drama with Weckerle, we guess. Breaking up on Twitter? Far more suited to Jimmy's attention span. The only question: When are Wales's backers at Wikia — Bessemer Venture Partners and Amazon.com among them — going to lose interest in him, too?

No one wants to give their last-minute, late-night, drunk-from-the-open bar Craigslist "date" their real phone number. It's this free-sex market that Hookupdigits hopes to tap: the site generates proxy phone numbers that expire after 7 days, good for calls ten minutes or less in length. Other startups have gone here before: Numbr was a disposable call forwarding service, and Jangl gave both halves of the hookup a unique number. Both have since folded. The failures of its predecessors isn't Hookupdigits biggest problem. Let's start with the photo they use as their lead graphic — of San Francisco Web microcelebrities Chris Messina and Tara Hunt, whose "digitally enabled breakup" was so blogged about that it made it into print.Leave aside having a fairly public former couple as the face of their business. It's not clear how Hookupdigits believes they'll turn a profit. One of the players behind the site contacted me offering me "rev share" if I "really loved it." A rev share of what? The Google AdSense ads overdecorating the site? It's a shame that those who would most benefit from Hookupdigits — Internet sex workers and their clients — are exactly the people Hookupdigits can't overtly market to, maybe for fear of being heavily surveilled by law enforcement. What will shut them down won't be police involvement, but lack of a user base. There are still far more people meeting through online dating sites who want to swap real phone numbers before they share anything else — as a sign of mutual trust. Call it old-fashioned. At least if you share your real cell number, you can text your good time, too.

When we popularized "the 250" as a nickname for San Francisco's Internet cool-kids crowd, we didn't realize how literal the incest was. Take the flirtation between Flickr's engineering chief, Cal Henderson, and Ariel Waldman, the community manager of Pownce, an online file-sharing service. Pownce was cofounded by Leah Culver, Henderson's ex-girlfriend, who has also dated around the scene. Henderson and Waldman traveled to Hawaii together, and have made jokes — on Twitter and Flickr, of course — about Henderson wishing Waldman shared his last name and calling her his "fake wife." It's all so darling, veering on disturbing.

For its work in turning millions of singles into camgirls and camboys for the sake of a hookup, dating site SpeedDate took in a $6M series B funding round from Menlo Ventures today. You remember, the folks who got poor Eric Eldon from VentureBeat three minutes in video heaven with deathcaster Sarah Austin? With SpeedDate claiming to setup 100,000 dates per day, you're less likely to run into the blogger early adopters lured in to promote the business as you were in its early days. And if dating a blogger is a dealbreaker for you, then you might want to ask yourself: Why are you looking for dates on the Internet again?

A couple makes out in a quiet area during the Google Dance last night — a traditional part of the festivities for the Search Engine Strategies conference. Bet they can't wait until the Mountain View search giant reaches 69 percent market penetration. We know you can do better, so crack wise in the comments and we'll make the best one the new title. Yesterday's winner was kimbjo with "Wish I was a little bit taller, wish I was a baller ..." (Photo by Roshan Vyas)

"Dating isn't dead, it's just changed names!" So the newspapers reassure us. Don't blame today's "hookup culture" on Web-driven moral decay or the rapid-thumbed narcissism of the Youngs. The Internet has actually saved romance. "They may not call it 'dating,' but they still 'go out,'" a Contra Costa Times reporter explains. "And when it gets serious enough, they announce it online and become 'Facebook official.'" Facebook has saved dating? Fine, one fewer thing to blame Sheryl Sandberg for. But it's still not true.Facebook's most hardcore users — young men pretending not to be looking for sex — can now mark their latest target as theirs in public. But this is no great victory, for women or for dating. Or, for that matter, for them. For one, it kills their prospects of picking up someone new as a stopgap before their current relationship fails. Unless they can somehow convince their current partner that really, talking about one's relationship in public is only for cads and showoffs, and she's gullible enough to agree. Even if they do "cancel" their relationship — to use Facebook's lingo — between tagged photos and archived News Feed items, users can no longer count on the one thing that fuels serial monogamy — consensual amnesia. What we can credit Facebook for, maybe, isn't saving romance. But it is saving a little bit of our honesty.

"We think it's a good thing that users can lie," said Tom Coates, of Fire Eagle, the location-tagging app Yahoo just opened up to all comers-and-goers. It's a topical spin on a problem as old as Dodgeball, the first widely adopted friend-finding cell-phone app. Dodgeball and its kin are ostensibly used for telling your friends where you are. But really? They're even better for avoiding people. Using a "mobile phone to play hide-and-seek is a welcome development for social-mapping services," claims Newsweek.com, based on a few users' own predictably poor personal habits of relying on technology to do their dirty work for them."What's appealing to some may feel a little creepy to others," Newsweek continues. The same goes for the users when signing up for these location-based apps in the first place. What are you asking a friend, exactly, when inviting them to view your movements around a city? It really means you want to see where they are, and who else they may be with. You're not going for friendship so much as mutually assured surveillance. That users are lying may be painful to friendships, but it's all that's holding the social fabric of these apps together. At Brightkite, glossing over the truth is even built in as a feature: Instead of your precise address being sent as an update, you can opt to have only your city transmitted. Of course, some of your "friends" will figure out immediately that you don't trust them with your whereabouts. All the more reason not to lean on the "social Web" to manage relationships. The very people most inclined to make use of these apps are the ones who could never pull off fibs with any delicacy in person. Ideally, new services would take people out of the equation even more, and let computers have a go at these problems from start to finish. When I ask my phone where the nearest cafe is, why can't it just know that I mean "the one where my ex isn't currently on a date with someone else, ignoring her and refreshing Twitter"?

Programming Django isn't quite the same as dropping Dorothy Parker quips at lushed-out parties, but Pownce cofounder Leah Culver's line last night warmed even my cynical heart. Scene: We were mobbed briefly around the photo booth at 330 Ritch, former gay bathhouse and setting for the public launch of Yahoo's location-based mobile social thing, Fire Eagle. "Melissa, I want you to meet Cal Henderson," she said, presenting Flickr's head of engineering. "He's a fan ..."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)

Plasticly popular MySpace personality Tila Tequila and Courtenay Semel, the daughter of ex-Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, attended a premiere together last night in Los Angeles. There, the pair confirmed a more successful merger than Semel senior ever managed. “I’d seen the show [A Shot at Love] and just needed to meet her and it just happened,” Semel told People magazine. “It’s true what they say about lesbians," said Tequila. "You meet and then the next day you move in together, because I can’t get rid of her. She pretty much lives at my house.” We think this is the only Yahoo-MySpace deal we'll see happen. (Photo by AP/Steinberg)

Why has everyone from Kathy Griffin to Steve Wozniak himself been so coy as to whether or not Woz has remarried? Well, for starters, it would have clearly tipped My Life on the D-List's audience that the "romance" between the comedienne and the billionaire Apple cofounder was a sham, though since when has that stopped reality television producers? More likely because longtime friend and Apple education development executive Janet Hill is publicity-averse. (Though that didn't stop the pair from showing up for the publicity scrum at the latest iPhone release.) Why will we never know, officially, if the pair are truly wed?

Click to viewA brief tip in our inbox today tells us that Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak tied the knot for the fourth time last night, but offered no other details. When Wozniak's strictly platonic relationship with comedienne Kathy Griffin hit the skids, Griffin suggested that the rotund Segway enthusiast had already found another paramour. In the latest episode of Griffin's My Life on the D-List, Griffin fessed up that she would never marry Woz, and that he got engaged only a month after they broke up. Who's the, erm, lucky lady? Dunno. Maybe someone at the "Woz Challenge Cup" Segway polo tournament in Indianapolis can clue us in with more details.

In a post about Google engineers using Street View to propose, commenter Norcross points out why the sign said "Proposal 2.0":

Click to viewWe're romantics at heart here at Valleywag — don't you know that's why we're so bitter? — but even we can't get behind Google employee Michael Weiss-Malik's marriage proposal, pictured above. It's not because we don't appreciate how clever it was of him to make a sign and wait for the Google Street View car to drive by — as smooth a move as you'll ever get from an engineer. It's because Weiss-Malik had to go and ruin it all by slapping a "2.0" on his proposal. What is this, a marriage proposal, or free marketing for Tim O'Reilly?

As relieved as we were to hear that Mary Lou Jepsen, the founder of cheap-laptop display startup Pixel Qi, had recovered from an eye infection acquired in Peru, we were a bit heartbroken to hear that she'd stopped wearing the eye patch she'd sported during a recent video interview. All the more so when we heard where she lived: On a floating house moored at Issaquah Dock, one of the houseboat colonies of Sausalito, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. Arrr, mateys! Mary Lou has boarded our hearts and taken our imagination captive.Jepsen rocks for so many reasons: She believes that capitalism is a more effective way to do good than an ego-fluffing nonprofit. She's working on actual hardware, solving real-world problems that matter to billions of people, not catering to the whims of a San Francisco/Brooklyn in crowd with a Web 2.0 startup. And she's refreshingly forthright. We never were much for Talk Like a Pirate Day, but come September, we now plan to dress up as Mary Lou Jepsen.

Web 2.0 wunderkinds Tara Hunt and Chris Messina hooked up, broke up, and now leave their company and a San Francisco magazine profile behind. Can Internet People run their relationships like their businesses?, we're meant to wonder, the tease of a question splayed out against the story's backdrop of conference-going glamor, multiblogged dates, and come-ons delivered in the form of schwag T-shirts. We 100-worded it so you can get back to Twittering about the lover you're not quite ready to leave yet: