John Lamansky

According to a post on the Official Google Blog:

Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time — and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product. Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here.

They don’t give a specific reason, but from what I’ve read across the Internet it seems to be at least in part because of the explosive popularity of Yahoo! Answers.

It’ll be somewhat sad to see this product go. But it’s kind of like a floppy drive: you have a peace of mind knowing you have one in case you really need it, but you almost never end up using it.

The Yahoo Buzz Game has been relaunched in a third round with new markets, just in time for (surprise!) the 2006 hurricane season. (Long-time players of the game will know that the only way to make or lose a large amount of (fake) money is during the hurricane seasons.)

Yes, this relaunch does make the game much more exciting for the time being, but how many people actually play this anymore?

According to this Yahoo Search blog post, the Yahoo Buzz Game is now back! From the Yahoo blog post:

Round 2 features a number of new stocks, including Google Earth, iRobot Scooba, the decidedly droolworthy Kaleidescape, and a mini-concentration in open source technologies, including open source databases, licensing, and GUI toolkits.

If you’re not familiar with the Tech Buzz Game, it’s a fantasy prediction market for technology. Your goal is to predict what technologies people will be searching the web for in the future. You put your (fantasy) money where your mouth is by buying stock in the technologies you believe will be popular and selling stock in the technologies you think will flop.

I played in the first round this summer when they were giving Apple prizes (iPod, iMac, etc.) to the top placers (no, I didn’t win anything). This round, however, seems to be “play for fun” only. Sign up at the Buzz Game website if you’re interested in playing.

[Correction (10/13/05): The first place prize was a Mac mini, not an iMac...]

One of the programs I’ve always had my eye on is Konfabulator, a program that delivers news and information from the Internet to your desktop in the form of “widgets.” Anyway, a change recently happened that makes me want to say “yahoo!”

Yahoo! recently acquired the company that creates Konfabulator, and have now made Konfabulator a free release. To download the program, visit www.konfabulator.com and then click “Download” on the menu bar. Be sure to also check out the widget gallery to browse the directory of the thousands of widgets you can download.

Here’s a list of widgets I’m currently using:

• Werewolf Monitor (bundled with Konfabulator) - a widget that shows the current phase of the moon.
• Firefox Downloads Counter - displays the number of times Firefox has been downloaded.
• mini Weather - small widget showing current weather conditions for the given zip code.
• Radar Widget - downloads scaled radar map from The Weather Channel website for a given area.
• Binary Clock - helps me practice my binary translation skills.