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.

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.

Renaissance marketer and professional conference attendee Tara Hunt made the iffy judgement call of allowing San Francisco magazine to document her highly public relationship with open source jihadvocate Chris Messina. The article ended up detailing the pair's breakup instead. Worse, Hunt says laying her soul bare 140 characters at a time backfired on her in a way she didn't expect. I bolded the fun parts:

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:

Hoo boy, four San Francisco conferences in one week! Starting with today's MashPit, this week is a con junkie's dream, as long as you have a guide to getting through.

Tara Hunt is leaving her spot as marketer at Web 2.0 startup Riya, according to a rumor.

Don't ask Web 2.0 (TM) evangelist Chris Messina about his business plan.

Web 2.0 (TM) marketer Tara Hunt is less than pleased with how "the media" (read: the SF Chronicle's embedded reporter Dan Fost) covered her event this weekend:

To prove how X-TREEM bloggers roll (they camp! it's in-tents), joined-at-the-hip tech couple Chris Messina and Tara Hunt pulled a gaggle of geeks out to Winecamp this weekend for some roughing-it fun. (By roughing it, I mean their Macs weren't connected to the Internet.) Embedded reporter Dan Fost (pictured) reports at the SF Chronicle's tech blog:

Great weekend ahead, and I'm not just saying that 'cause Valleywag takes a half-day tomorrow. Here — meet someone important by Memorial Day and pump 'em for info.

Forget Plazes, Dodgeball, and geotagging — it's impossible not to know where tech bloggers are. At this very moment:

Someone's been playing with Comic Life. A Flickr user named "Privateye" 'shopped up the shirtless shot of Naked Conversations authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. (That's JD Lasica's photo, first covered back here.)