We're live at Noon today

It's a special edition of the tech guys on Your Day. We'll be doing a live call in about all things tech, but we're especially interested in questions about digital photography! We'll have cameras in the studio, but you can't see them on the radio. If you've got questions about why you're having trouble getting the shot you want from you digi, then give us a call.



link: Your Day

Chat with ThinkHammer via Google Talk

I see that Google Talk now allows me to put a badge on my website that allows a visitor to live chat with the webmaster -- that's me. I'm going to give it a whirl.

If you think you'd like to start a quick chat with me, make your opening statement an answer to the following question:

How can I help you?



Let's see if we can do some good with it.

Explaining Twitter? Let these guys do it for you...

I never thought I had trouble explaining Twitter to someone. It's a low barrier to entry microblogging system that lets you easily share the therbligs of your life with your friends, family, and followers. No... I don't say it quite that way. I am the kind of guy who would use the word therblig in a sentence, but only if I were there to explain it. Only those of us tortured with the concepts of time and motion studies in college industrial management classes have probably ever seen the word. The point is that Twitter lets you easily share the little stuff in your life. The sphere of those around you can decide what they want to do with it.

Should all of this seem a bit dense, may I point you to the very clear description of Twitter found below:



On Twitter, I am Thinkhammer

Look up: therblig

Twitter + Spamtachments = Pownce

To: Pownce
From: Web 2.0 Users

It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here...(thanks Charles Grodin)

The irreverent uncov reminds us that Pownce is still alive, even if only barely. I might not have bothered mentioning the rather mundane continued existence of this particular Twitter clone, but Pownce isn't just a Twitter clone. It's an annoying Twitter clone. Think of Danny DeVito v. Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie Twins.

While I might Twitter or even Jaiku to my pals, I swore off Pownce because I kept getting useless links to attachments, pictures, videos, and other unwanted interruptions. Since they were unwanted, I deemed them spam. (Even my friends can spam me.) I thought that I might be outside of their target demographic and too remote from the "in crowd" to understand why some people might want this. It appears that I wasn't the only one who didn't get Pownce. At TechCrunch, Arrington muses that Pownce may be a dead pool candidate.

uncov's clever chart says that Pownce is beyond even the resuscitory powers of power blogger Arrington. The compete chart below suggests nothing different. I tossed in Jaiku's traffic for comparison. Even though Jaiku's traffic may be in the dumpster with Pownce, they can never die as the eternally revitalizing blood of Google now runs in their veins.

Jaiku is being upgraded

My Browser's title bar says "Jaiku is being upgraded." My screen says:



I can hardly wait!

:look for yourself

OBVIOUSLY: Where do you lose the most productivity?

From the department of the patently OBVIOUS:

The maker of TWITTER wants to know where you lose the most productivity during the day. Shouldn't TWITTER be one of the choices?

Take Ev's survey.

Did Facebook kill Yahoo 360?

Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang started to answer the question Where does Yahoo! head next? on the Yahoo blog today. The answer is necessarily incomplete, they can't go around telegraphing all of their moves, although it's hard to say who would follow them. Still Yang says that Yahoo's social blogging, friend networking, Web 2.0 ghost town, Yahoo 360 will be transitioning into some new, and apparently undecided upon Yahoo profile which might be Yahoo's reportedly underwhelming, but still invitation only Yahoo Mash.

Never fear, they won't through out your stuff, even if they don't know where they'll be moving it to. According to the Yahoo 360 Blog:

• We will preserve your Yahoo! 360 blog content, profile photo, nickname, and friends lists during and after the transition
• We will provide the right tools to move your blog content;
• We will give you ample notice before this transition begins in early 2008.

What they really don't want right now is to lose any more subscribers. The fact is that they don't know what comes next and they say as much in their own blog. They'll kill whatever makes sense and hopefully come up with something better. If they do come up with something better, we'll all know right away, because despite the popularity of Facebook and others, Yahoo is still a primary launch point for those who aren't completely familiar with the web. If the service is cool, they will hear about it from their friends in Yahoo Groups, or will see it on Yahoo's portal page and dive in headlong. Most Web 2.0 startups hope that they will build a better website and that they will get lucky and eventually be discovered and then build traffic and havee a real business. Yahoo needs no such luck. They simply need to build a better, more novel approach to Facebook and the masses will come easily. No matter that they have had lots of attempts that didn't work, they have the seed audience. What they now need is to get their act together.

Facebook didn't kill Yahoo 360. Yahoo engineered the demise of Yahoo 360 by building and delivering a platform that was more interesting to the advertisers than the users. In the end, not even the advertisers cared.