So, a video game that rewards being adventurous and outgoing in, you know, real life?

Mr. Crowley and his partner Naveen Selvadurai introduced their Foursquare mobile phone application to more than 500 Meetup members at the F.I.T. Haft Audiorium on 27th Street. With Foursquare, users can download a mobile application that will let their friends know exactly where they are (by text message, Twitter and on maps, too!), and also find fun, new things to do in spots in their immediate location--"like, try this specific beer at Spitzer's Corner," Mr. Selvadurai explained. Users can create their own tips and track all the cool things they've done (in a "Top 12") and the things they want to do (in a "To Do" list).

But it's also a nightlife game. Users rack up points based on how many new places they visit, how many stops they've made in one night and who else has been there. You become a "mayor" of a hot spot if you're there often. Mr. Crowley used an example of Spitzer's Corner, where Nate Westheimer, N.Y.T.M.'s head organizer, hangs out. "If you check in there one more time than Nate, then you get a message, 'Oh you stole the title of mayor from Nate,'" Mr. Crowley told the Observer in a phone interview this morning. "People get kind of competitve about this." There's a "Leaderboard" which lists the most adventurous users with the most points.

But, Mr. Crowley said, "If you keep doing the same things over and over again, if you go to the same place several times a week, your points get taken away."

Eventually, you can acquire electronic badges for your achievements. "It's almost like X-Box Live achievements, but for real-life, social life, nightlife," Mr. Crowley explained. "You start to earn these badges as you do interesting things in the city." Go out four nights in a row and receive a "bender" badge. There's a "Brooklyn 4 Life" badge for those who bar crawl in that borough. If you check out a few of the 25 spots tagged as a "douchebags" hangouts around the city, you'll get a "douchebag" badge for your bravery. There are currently 16 badges, "but the idea is to have like 300 of them, with users creating badges for each other," Mr. Crowley said.

Foursquare also built in user-generated tips for cool things to do in the city, like trying to certain kind of beer at a bar or checking out an underground club. "We wanted things that were really actionable that then people could do," Mr. Crowley told the Observer. "If you have a friend coming from out of town, and they say, 'Oh, I'm going to be here for the weekend,' they can look up, like, these are the ten best things to do on the Lower East Side."

Of course they are just in time to test it out at SXSW, the music, technology and culture fest in Austin, Texas (where Dodgeball thrived in 2006).

There are, of course, other applications, like Google Latitude, that allow users to see where their friends are on their mobile phones. But "it just seems really boring," Mr. Crowley told the Observer. "There's no personality to the service, it takes all the fun out of it. How do you explicitly put all the fun back into it?"

Foursquare is Mr. Crowley's second act in the mobile social networking application world. A 2004 graduate , and now adjunct professor, at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, Mr. Crowley was the co-founder of Dodgeball, a service that let its users share their location with friends via text messages. He created the service in April 2004, along with his business partner and NYU classmate Alex Rainert, and Google bought Dodgeball in May 2005. Mr. Crowley and Mr. Rainert resigned from their Google duties in April 2007, and Google decided to discontinue the obscure, yet much-beloved service in January this year, officially shutting it down last Friday. Dodgeball faithfuls gathered for a final good bye to the service at Bowery Electric on March 6.

"I'm interested in starting over again," Mr. Crowley told the Observer. "Dodgeball got a little bit of a bad rep because there was such a hardcore group of Dodgeball users. For better or for worse, people stereotyped us for that."

Foursquare is a amped-up version of Dodgeball that, appropriately, can be played like a game. But you can't play just yet. Mr. Crowley and Mr. Selvadurai are waiting for approval from Apple to sell the iPhone application in the App Store, but plan to make the service available on all kinds of mobile platforms, including BlackBerrys. Currently the service is in private beta.

"The principle of a lot of this stuff is just to encourage people to stop going to the same places, start doing more interesting things," Mr. Crowley said.

"There's a lot of people playing in this mobile social space, and when you click with these tools, this feels like an episode of Seinfeld, like it's a scene you see over and over again--the same people at the same places all the time. And we're looking for ways we can use these social mobile tools to kind of encourage people to do things they wouldn't normally do."

What can you find? At the moment, it only includes New York, Popular Science, and Ebony, but it's still got a lot of great stuff.

Update, 5:05 p.m.: A Google rep emailed Media Mob (how do they keep track of everything online—oh, right) to tell us that the archive also includes Liberty, Jet, Ebony Jr., Baseball Digest, Black Belt, Men's Health, and Prevention.

Check out New York's April 29, 1968 profile of Warhol superstar Viva, La Dolce Viva by Barbara L. Goldsmith with that famous nude photo by Diane Arbus that still packs a visceral punch. (Sadly, we couldn't find Tom Wolfe's "Tiny Mummies.")

Wanna learn what it was like to fly a jetpack? See Popular Science's November 1969 cover story.

Or check out Ebony's provocative August 1965 cover story, "The WHITE Problem in America."

If the planet-devouring search engine is bringing about the dumbening of mankind, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell might just be the last intelligent man, according to New York's profile of him by Jason Zengerle.

Writes Mr. Zengerle in this week's Geek Pop Star:

Perhaps Mr. Gladwell will be like Will Smith's in I Am Legend, holing himself up at Bobst Library, coming up with new theories to save mankind when Google final drains our brains dry.

A couple hundred of the city's tech stars, from Facebook reps to the heads of tiny start-ups, were munching on mini lobster burgers and chicken paella in little tortilla spoons while slurping mango mint mojitos. Most were on the recently released list of New York's digital A-listers. "There's a list?" asked Mr. Armstrong, a tall, dark, dashing guy with slicked-back hair and a sharp suit. "What kind of list? Is it a good one to be on? 'Cause I've been on a lot of 'em."

This particular list was The Silicon Alley 100, the yearly roll call of the top movers and shakers in New York's tech community decided upon by Silicon Alley Insider. The digital business news site and the Founders Club, which throws swanky, invitation-only cocktail parties for the CEOs of digital start-ups and the financiers who fund them, brought together all the tech superstars to drink up and celebrate.

Whether he knew it or not, Mr. Armstrong was listed as No. 7, under Ken Lerer, new-media investor and co-founder of the Huffington Post, and above Bob Pittman, the former AOL guru who bought DailyCandy in 2003 for $3 million and sold it to Comcast in July for $125 million.

Jason Liebman, a bespectacled, wiry guy standing next to Mr. Armstrong, tried to explain to him what the party was all about. "It's definitely a good list to be on. You're probably one of the most important guys here!" he gushed. Mr. Leibman is also a Google comrade who worked at the company for four years on their YouTube, Google Video and AdSense teams. Now he's the CEO of Howcast, a site that produces and distributes how-to videos on the Web. He said parties like this allow New York's tech people to come out from behind their desks, iPhones, BlackBerries and Google Android phones to "pop our heads up a little bit." Mr. Liebman did not make the list.

Gawker's Nick Denton (No. 3) was there along with Curbed Network's Lockhart Steele (No. 33). Venture capitalists from RRE, Bain Capital and others were there, too, along with angel investors like Roger Ehrenberg (No. 86) and NYC Seed's Owen Davis (No. 76). Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV (No. 60) was sipping on some vino and David Kidder, CEO of Clickable (No. 47), was around, too. New York's young'uns, including Tumblr's David Karp (No. 80); Jordan Goldman of college review site Unigo (No. 91), who was profiled in The New York Times Magazine; and party boy Charles Forman, founder of iminlikewithyou.com and Gawker's person of interest (No. 97), were also seen mingling.

Drop.io's Sam Lessin didn't make the list, but was named as an "Up and Comer." He was settling a debate with Path101 CEO Charlie O'Donnell (No. 61) that they recently had in the comments section of Mr. O'Donnell's blog: "When we both started using dot dot dot (...) to illustrate our points, I think we were both getting angry," Mr. Lessin said.

Mr. Lessin gave us an update on drop.io, which will soon go hardware-free by joining the Amazon Cloud and will be redesigned. He also said he's working with Condé Nast to set up some private online space for them. And about all that Camp Cyprus controversy, in which he and a few of his young tech star friends and a reporter for The Wall Street Journal got a bit too much flak for making a video of themselves singing Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" at his dad's lavish home while the financial markets tumbled? "I learned so much from that about the power and movement of how things make it through the blogs." So, it was a learning experience.

One venture capitalist told me: "That kid is going to make five start-ups in New York and just be so successful. A smart guy."

Another smart guy, Scott Heiferman, co-founder and CEO of Meetup.com, is No. 10 on the Silicon Alley 100, not only for making his company one of the most successful Web 2.0 start-ups in New York but for organizing the monthly Tech Meetup, which is "still the hottest digital get-together in Silicon Alley, giving startups and tech devotees a chance to get the scoop on the latest in the Alley," according to Silicon Alley Insider.

"Well, I don't want you to think I'm just eating my own dog food and organizing the Tech Meetup," Mr. Heiferman said. Certainly not. "My whole life is Meetup.com. … People need community more than ever now," he said, referring to the current financial crisis. "They're genuinely freaking out." His top user demographic? Moms! Most are looking for babysitting.

Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, No. 1 on the list, wasn't able to make it to the party because he was attending a family event (according to a V.C. friend). He's known to not be a fan of these types of lists and wrote on his twitter: "i don't know why bloomberg isn't #1 again. he's convinced the city to blow off term limits and let him serve again. it's FDR like." Mr. Bloomberg was the No. 1 on the Silicon Alley 100 last year.

Kevin Ryan, CEO of Alley Corp and co-founder of Silicon Alley Insider, helped choose who would be on the Silicon Alley 100 list. He said Mr. Wilson was No. 1 because "when you say venture capitalist in New York, he's the first person who comes to mind" and "he embodies the Internet. He embodies the young people. Well, not that he's young, but he is willing to try new things and new products just like a young person."

Dina Kaplan, co-founder and COO of Blip.tv, said her partner in party-planning for the Founders Club, Dan Allen of Bain Capital Ventures, brokered the deal with Mr. Ryan and Henry Blodget, Silicon Alley Insider's editor in chief, to have last night's celebration at the U.S. Open. She said the series of exclusive, floating parties (which has been hosted at the SNL studio and the IAC/InterActiveCorp building) is a way to build a better community. She wants the city off the "B-list" of tech and help the press understand that technology exists outside of Silicon Valley. It's right here in New York.

"Everyone in the room is getting drunk off the Obama Kool-Aid because they know he'll be the president who actually will empower the potential of technology," said Andrew Rasiej, founder of personaldemocracyforum.com and techPresident.com. In 2005, he ran for public advocate of New York City on a platform to bring low cost wireless Internet access to all New Yorkers. He told us last night that in his discussion with The New York Times during an endorsement meeting, it took him 45 minutes to explain to them the concept of wi-fi. "There's a lot of old hands, old money in New York," he said.

But the young ones are up and coming, for sure. At the end of the night, CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy, Mr. Karp and Mr. Forman were heading out for a Tumblr-organized Halloween party. Before he left, Mr. Forman gave us a hardy high five (and a low one for good measure) and handed us his postcard-size business card with a few snapshots of him on the front (one in which he is shirtless). On the back: "I gave you this card because I didn't feel like talking to you anymore. Just kidding! LOLZ! With a card like this, you're probably thinking, 'This guy should walk around with a crown.' Shit. That's a good idea!"

According to Ms. Schatz, for $100, Google will provide access to the workspace along with "food and beverages, Google-sponsored massages, smoothies and a candy buffet."

If it's half as comfortable as it sounds, it will be a vast improvement over bloggers' digs during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. Turn back the calender page to Sept. 26, 2004, when The New York Times Magazine placed Wonkette's then-editor Ana Marie Cox on its cover with Jack Germond and the late R. W. Apple and a laptop so huge it could've been a briefcase.

In the accompanying article, Matthew Klam described the glamorous blogger workspace as follows:

Yeah, that was rough. And no freakin' massages.

After examining several ways in which our brains have been rewired by our dependence on the web, Mr. Carr notes:

Are these new-media rules? Or just a different old medium's?

In February, The Observer's John Koblin talked to Mr. Bodkin who said this of The Times' front-of-book rejiggering: “This will be a bit of a magazine model."

"If you skim through page one and then go through two and three, you’ll sort of touch every major news story of the day and every significant story in the paper... All of the changes are going to address some perceived issues with the paper that we anecdotally hear from readers—that they don’t have enough time to get through the paper. This is a reader’s service."

One of the videos features the magazine's former executive editor, Kevin Kelly, whom The New York Times Magazine described in May 1995 as "Wired's Big Think guy" ("'the balloon we follow around,' as one staffer calls him"). In it, Kelly speculates on what the magazine and its Web sites might've become had the print side not been sold to Condé Nast in 1998 and Wired News not been sold to Lycos in 1999. (The two divisions were reunited in 2006 under the Condé Nast umbrella):

Win some; lose some.

Guests have included Junot Diaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), The New Yorker's Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower) and Alex Ross (The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century), George Saunders (The Braindead Megaphone), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything), and Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love).

There's also Candidates@Google (Ron Paul, John McCain, John Edwards) and Women@Google (Hillary Clinton, Arianna Huffington)!

The California-based Internet giant has expanded its city headquarters at 76 Ninth Avenue by 49,000 square feet, increasing its total presence in the building to 360,000 square feet, said GVA Williams broker Robert Tunis, who represents Google.

At the same time, across the street, there’s a major lease agreement for more than 100,000 square feet at Chelsea Market at 75 Ninth Avenue with a deal close to being finalized, a source said. The source did not confirm that Google was the tenant, but the Internet giant is on a very short list of tenants looking for space in Chelsea, and is one of the few with the financial wherewithal to make such a move.

A real estate executive involved with the pending deal said he couldn’t confirm that a lease was nearly signed because, he explained, Google has a policy of keeping matters private until a deal is complete.

Mr. Tunis declined to comment on any potential deal at Chelsea Market, but a spokesman for Google didn’t deny the expansion and wrote in an e-mail: “While I cannot comment on a specific property, New York is significant to Google as we have many users, employees, advertisers and publishers there, and it is an important base for recruiting. We will always seek to acquire space as necessary to meet our needs.”

Likewise, a spokesman for Chelsea Market wrote in an e-mail: “It is not ownership’s policy to speculate on lease agreements between Chelsea Market and any potential future tenant.”

Another source said he could not confirm that Google was currently in negotiations but said a deal would be completed shortly at Chelsea Market with a “good credit tenant.” EMI and the advertising firm WPP are both looking for space in Midtown South as well.

Google moved its city headquarters in September 2006 from Times Square to a 311,000-square-foot space at 76 Ninth Avenue—a.k.a. 111 Eighth Avenue—and later indicated it was looking to expand even more in the area, according to a source briefed on the matter.

There are currently 60,000 square feet available at Chelsea Market, said a source. But another source said that as much as 100,000 square feet is available with an option to expand to more than 200,000 square feet in the next few years.

The gap between a lease agreement and a signed lease, however, is much wider—and more vulnerable to collapse—than the gap between a contract and a closed deal for a building sale.

Richard Warshauer, a GVA Williams broker who is also representing Google, declined comment. David Falk and Nick Berger, brokers at Newmark Knight Frank, which represents Chelsea Market, would not be interviewed for this story.

Chelsea Market, the quirky one-million-square-foot office tower on Ninth Avenue, is also home to EMI, NY1 and Major League Baseball.