Mr. Kweli was a no-show; Mr. Selvadurai was also nowhere to be seen. "Furthermore, no one at the event that I spoke to had ever heard of Turntable.fm or understood why they were just looking at five people playing songs from a laptop," our tipster writes. "They were clearly expecting some Talib Kweli turntablism. To make matters worse, their showcase was in between an amazing turntablism set by AraabMuzik and an anticipated set by indie band The Dum Dum Girls, which left the turntable.fm as a head scratcher for people attending CMJ."

Why would Mr. Kweli, who has shown TT love before, drop out of the mix?

7. Sick of Turntable hype.

6. Afraid of the gingers.

5. Intimidated by DJ Wooooooo.

4. Had some bad Chinese.

3. At Occupy Wall Street.

2. BlackBerry died, didn't get the Google Calendar reminder, thought it was tomorrow.

1. Was in DC for a show.

AS THE SQUARE FOURS: Foursquare has fired its PR agency, Kaplow, 'asploding a six-figure contract. We were on the receiving end of Kaplow's efforts, which most recently included a foodie walking tour on which we expected to get free food but, like, it got rescheduled and then we couldn't go. But they seemed fine! What was wrong? Could it be that foursquare just gets oodles of fucking publicity without having to lift a finger? Could that be it? They should pay Betabeat for all the PR we do! *Stupid foursquare.

PR PRANKS. "I'm going to make up a bunch of lies and tell a bunch of people and see who reports it without checking facts," tweets Brandee Barker, former Facebook flack. Which would have been a great idea if she hadn't twttred about it?

SMALL BRITCHES. Tumblr is scouting office space, and it's not easy. The startup's team is now more than 50 people squished into its Flatiron digs, and it just raised a monster round--time to get that baller office quick to fit in all the chic new Tumbsters! But finding the perfect, cutest, coolest, raddest office space in all the land is no small task. Betabeat got a tip that Tumblr made a play for 598 Broadway, the sunny Soho building that houses fellow New York rockstar startup ZocDoc, but things didn't pan out. It's possible, says our source, that Tumblr got nudged out by another local startup.

CUBES LOOSE ON CRAIGSLIST. Oh no, is Loosecubes going all Airbnb on us? We stumbled upon this listing for a sunny desk space, directing Craigslisters to a Loosecubes listing appended with the tagline, "Loosecubes is a community marketplace for great workspace." Clever, or toeing the line of spammership?

*omg kidding

While celebs get the special avatar treatment for free, its easy to see how Turntable could turn this into a revenue stream, selling users the option to create a more accurate digital likeness.

Hopefully nobody owns a patent on the creation of digital faces...

Talib Kweli! He of the original okayplayer crew who Jay-Z would be (if skills sold)! Quoteth Talib:

And what's in a verified name? Well, for one thing, as evidenced above, you get your own avatar. Neat. Also, probably an unofficial benefit, but one of the strangest-looking and acting things on the internet right now?

The other most recent Turntable adopters was Birkenstock-rock band Guster, who premiered an entire album on it. Also, someone called Dead Mouse? Rich Hil has yet to approach the music-sharing service, but given the new echelon of fame he achieved today, it's obviously happening in no time.

Talib has been a constant presence on the service for a while, spinning sets with celeb DJs like No ID that routinely drew a packed crowd (we just got turned away at the lobby, fire code violation).

In other news, people still use Turntable.fm.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Since we lasted spotted Mr. Sacca getting his mind blown over magic tricks with Turntable.fm co-founder Seth Goldstein, we took him at his tweet. [Avatar] heads started bouncing when Mr. Kweli put on some "H&O," which we, naturally, take to mean Hall & Oates. ("I Can't Go For That"? "Rich Girl"? Wait, wait, no, don't tell us . . . "Maneater"!)

But apparently not all Turntable.fm's brushes with fame have ended so pleasantly in the streaming music/chatroom/chance to DJ service. Take, for example, Paul Miller's account on This My Next of the time he walked into Turntable.fm's VIPfest room to find Diplo, Gorilla vs. Bear, the founder of Pitchfork, and Carles from Hipster Runoff. "That’s when things got weird."

When I was in the room earlier I had failed to notice it was being helmed by Gorilla vs. Bear, of Gorilla vs. Bear fame. Next to him was Ryan Schreiber, founder of Pitchfork. In chat was “the REAL DIPLO,” who turned out to be the real Diplo. Through the magical celebrities-are-people-too power of Twitter, Diplo had followed Ryan into the room, and now GvB was attempting to get him on the decks.

. . . It was pretty fun, but I was more caught up with the idea that some nice celebrity man was playing music that he’d clearly uploaded from his computer onto a bizarre new service where you choose an avatar and pretend to be at a live concert while you’re actually talking in a circa 1990s chat room.Nobody else seemed to be so enamored — Diplo was winning plenty of followers and some of my fellow Zynga-alikes were bobbing their virtual heads, but the haters were much more vocal: “Diplo? More like DipNO!” After GvB and Ryan played some tracks, Diplo hit us with another new one: “Untitled.” By this point the room had basically gone insane. Many of the people GvB had booted to get Diplo on the decks were griping about it, others were spamming the chat with requests to play, promising great selections from their musical catalogs. Others had given up on begging, and were instead spamming links to a new room they’d created. But everybody else seemed to be trashing Diplo, Major Lazer, and “Untitled.” After finishing his playthrough, Diplo left because of all the “h8.”

Once Diplo peaced, this insanity happened:

I haven’t seen a room this wild since my AOL Chat days. A ton of users had changed their names to celebrities. There was a Lady Gaga, a Bon Iver, and a Joanna Newsom, to name a few. None of these checked out on Twitter, sadly. A DJ named “Carles” (who turns out to be Carles of Hipster Runoff, completely unknown to me at the time) played “Mandolin Rain” (a hilarious juxtaposition to the chat that was ensuing) and Pitchfork Ryan tweeted about it. Bon Iver became enough of a meme that GvB played “Beth / Rest” off of Bon Iver. It was seriously chill, the best song I’d heard all night. The chat turned on Pitchfork’s 9.5 score of the album, almost as if Pitchfork Ryan wasn’t there. Some people just typed “9.5″ into their chat box and then hit enter. The virtual Ryan, nodding his avatar’s head to the beat, asked us all: “can u feel the 9.5… all around[?]” Carles “spun” a dark, terrifying spoken word track he’d recorded about VIPfest called “VIPfest is s0 VIP.” I was scared.

Does this mean we have to count Diplo among the early Turntable.fm enthusiasts who burned out too quickly from the "alive web"? Of course not. After Carles stepped down from the DJ booth, Diplo came back into the room and tried to win the crowd over with another track. After all, Turntable.fm knows how to make a product sticky: tune it in to users' egos.