You know those people that just have to tweet about everything, from their morning Cheerios, to their nightly Crest  White Strips treatment? Well, it would seem that the wife of Twitter CEO Ev Williams is one of those folks, given that she recently enjoyed “tweeting” during labor. Of course, her in-labor tweets are a publicity boost for Twitter (as if they need it) which certainly can’t hurt things for the micro blogging platform, but it does bring up the question – When is a situation just too personal to tweet about?

In this case, with iPhone firm in hand, Sara Williams tweeted from the time her water broke up to the time she was required to push. Apparently she even used an iPhone app to measure the time between contractions. Her last tweet before the actual child birth was a both humorous and likely serious “Epidural, yes please.”

While the pains of labor would probably have me throwing my iPhone at the wall, I do think it’s kind of funny that someone could think of tweeting at a time like that, and I have to believe that it was likely planned as a publicity move for Twitter. I know quite a few people thought her tweeting during labor was a bit tasteless, but either way, they sure are talking about it, and that’s probably good news for Twitter.

If you’re a user and fan of the micro-blogging platform Pownce, I have some bad news for you. The company has been purchased by Six Apart Media, and they aren’t planning big things for it – in fact, they’re shutting the doors and leaving Pownce users out in the rain.

There’s really not a lot of time left on Pownce’s lifeline, as — per the official Pownce blog — it is set to be shutdown on the fifteenth of this month.

So why did Six Apart bother to buy Pownce in the first place? Likely they never intended to run Pownce, but merely bought it in order to acquire the company’s team of talented web-professionals.

To anybody who has been following the micro-blogging platforms, the demise of Pownce should really come as no surprise, as the similar service Twitter has taken off like a rocket, leaving Pownce and others (Plurk comes to mind) in the dust.

Yes, my weekends are exciting.

I was having some files issues with my (Vista) PC over the weekend, and came across a pretty good file removal software (clone remover), so thought I’d give it a little props here.

It can be annoying and time-consuming to find duplicate files, (especially when you have as much data on your PC as we at TechConsumer tend to keep) and Windows isn’t really set-up to locate them easily. It was nice to find a software that provides a little help in this regard.

No, I’m not trying to sell you anything – you can go to the Moleskinsoft duplicate files remover page and download the file finding software for free. It will allow you to search for duplicate files by content, properties, mp3 title, for similar images, or files with a zero size.

For my specific purposes, what I needed to do is use the similar images function (maybe I need to get better at naming and organizing my images in the first place – but the moleskin software sort of came to my rescue), which basically finds similar images in such formats as (.jpg, .bmp, .png, .psd and others) that differ in resolution, or have a difference such as a caption. This proved to be a timesaver, and probably prevented a big headache on this author’s end.

Chrome is coming! Google’s open source browser project, is coming out in Windows beta. It will be available here soon. This comic by Scott McCloud, creator of the classic Understanding Comics, does a nice job of explaining the technical details. Here is a brief summary:

Extreme tab makeover: Instead of traditional tabs below the address bar (like Firefox), Chrome puts the tab buttons on the upper side of the window.

Multi-process design: This is said to use “a bit more memory up front” but it splits up the processing jobs of individual tabs. It’s similar to the design used in operating systems, with multiple processes happening at the same time. One advantage is that an error that would normally cause your whole browser to crash will now only crash that particular tab. Also, when web pages or plug-ins use a lot of memory, you can spot them in Chrome’s task manager.

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Thanks a lot, Mattel. Although, I can’t really blame you – it was an obvious intellectual rights infringement. However, that doesn’t stop me from pining for Scrabulous.

One of the few Facebook (third party, of course) apps worth having, is now blocked in pretty much everyone’s neck of the woods, seemingly permanently. Scrabulous, which was already blocked last month for North American users, has now been cruelly banished from most international Facebook sites – due to a warning Facebook received from Mattel.

Scrabulous creators, the Argwalla brothers, have produce a some-what less-addictive clone called Wordscraper. The new app has a few tweaks such as circular tiles and the possibility of earning triple points in some cases. I suppose they feel Wordscraper is different enough to avoid further legal issues, but that’s yet to be determined – so try not to get too addicted, as the rug could be yanked out at anytime.

Hasbro, the American rights holder of Scrabble, have gone ahead and released their own scrabble-themed app, which is receiving mixed reviews. The main drawbacks appear to be an abundance of bugs, and the inability to play along with users outside of North America. We’ll see which of the apps wins out in the end.

A recent post of mine about Firefox and my general view of corporations and organizations caused a bit of a stir. It even caught the attention of Asa Dotzler, a prominent Mozilla employee. In Mr. Dotzler’s rebuff of my post he said something that has really bothered me. He said “It’s really hard for me to believe that either [Microsoft or Adobe] have the free and open Web at heart when they’re actively subverting it with closed technologies like Flash and Silverlight.” But are they really subverting it? Where exactly is the line between serving the consumer and subverting the web?

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The beauty of the internet is that when you write about things you’re interested in, you get to meet other people interested in the same things. A few days ago I wrote a few thoughts about “geocontent,” and a user named “deprimer” commented on my article and pointed me toward Socialight.

Socialight is probably the closest thing yet to what I’ve been writing and talking about for years. It’s a site that allows you to easily link content to a specific geographic location. Within 3 minutes of arriving on the site, I had an account and had created my first “sticky.” A sticky is a way to say, “Hey, this content is useful to this location.”

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The browser wars have been heating up lately with the recent releases of Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5. As a long-time Phoenix Firebird Firefox user and recent convert to Opera Mini (which is excellent, btw) on my Treo, I thought I’d run these two through their paces to see what they are made of. The hits and misses after the jump.

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The problem with the Internet is that any whacko with a connection gets to throw out his/her opinion, however wrong it may be. The Internet’s saving grace is that other whackoes can point out just how wrong the first whacko is.

Charlie Barratt wrote an article over at GamesRadar in which he points out that Wikipedia is nothing more than a haven for nerds. Sure, there may be millions of articles, but they are all about nerdy things. Wikipedia lacks real meat.

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It’s been almost one year to the day since I posted my article on TechConsumer about why “Web 2.0″ wasn’t enough, and how “geocontent” might just well be the next big thing.

I’ve yet to change my opinion.

During the past year I have seen many strides taken by many companies in the effort to link content to location. Google is interested; Yahoo is interested. We all know the latest iPhone will have GPS. It is no longer a question of if it will happen, but rather, the question is when will it happen. And who will be the big winner?

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