Big news!

Boy, we've got a lot of news to share. First things first:

We've got a new name
While Plinky is still the name of our beloved content-encouragement site, we've decided to change the name of the company to Thing Labs.

We've got a new VP of technology
Chris Wetherell has joined us as our vice president of technology. Chris worked with Jason on Google Reader and Blogger, and adds talent, leadership and a surprising amount of singing to Thing Labs.

We moved
While we liked our surroundings in our original Lafayette, Calif. office, we like our new ones in San Francisco's beautiful Mint Plaza even more. There's a Blue Bottle Coffee, great restaurants, orange chairs and a whole lot more. Our office itself is much more suitable for coding, writing, discussing, creating, blasting Lil' Wayne, and all of the other things required to make great software.

We're working on new things
Don't worry – Plinky the product will continue to live on, providing inspiration for you to write and share content with the world. But we've been bitten by more than one creative bug lately, and we're building some fun new things that we'll be able to share with you soonish.

Welcome, NYT Magazine readers

We're delighted to be featured in this weekend's New York Times Magazine. Columnist Rob Walker, author of the book "Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are," spoke with Jason recently and wrote up a nice piece explaining the goal and appeal of Plinky.

The only thing...technology cannot do is solve this problem: What if you don’t really have anything to express?

Ah, but technology can solve that problem for you. Plinky.com, which officially went online in January, exists specifically to offer what it calls prompts, meant to inspire interesting thoughts to share with the world.

If you're new to the site, welcome, and be sure to page through our prompts to answer some of the fun ones Rob mentioned (and many more). You can also follow @plinky and @plinkyprompts on Twitter.

New guest contributor Josh A. Cagan

The first time I heard of Josh. A Cagan was his brilliant "Letter From Hollywood" he wrote for The Morning News during the Hollywood writers' strike of 2007. I forgot about Josh until he joined Twitter and started dropping hilarious one-liners and eventually headline-inspired punchlines. When he opened up "Punchline Friday" as a user contest, I thought I'd participate and offered up my own entry. I won that first contest, possibly due to a lack of other entrants. Josh followed up to get my address so he could send my prize. I thought the whole thing was a joke, but sent him my address anyway.

The next week, I got a delivery addressed from "American Science & Surplus." I opened the package (a reused McDonald's coffee cup box) to find a box full of a random assortment of bizarre consumer goods and toys including glow-in-the-dark temporary snake and lizard tattoos, a jumbo key holder (shaped like a key, naturally), a fanny pack, and a 9-piece wood turkey decoration set. Surprise! I knew right then and there that I'd made a very special new Internet friend.

When we launched Plinky, Josh joined and started writing some of the best answers we'd seen. So it's our pleasure to present the week of Cagan from today through Sunday, during which you'll be delighted, challenged, repulsed, and more by Josh's fantastic prompts. Enjoy.

How to use "use"

Since we launched in January, we've received a few compliments on one of our rotating taglines: "Hey, didn't you use to have a blog?" This particular tagline came from a comment someone made to Jason at a cocktail party a few months before we launched.

Since then, though, there's been considerable debate about the grammar of the sentence. When we first posted it, I thought the correct form was, "Hey, didn't you used to have a blog?" After a reader of Maggie's blog posted a comment enlightening me, however, I have seen the light: the correct form is "use." According to The American Heritage Book of English Usage:

"We use the verb use in its past tense with an infinitive to indicate a past condition or habitual practice: We used to live in that house...When do occurs with this form of use in negative statements and in questions, the situation is reversed, and use to (not used to) is correct: You did not use to play on that team. Didn’t she use to work for your company?"

Several people have written to us to tell us that the current version is wrong, sharing my earlier confusion over this somewhat tricky rule in this very perplexing language. However, rest assured that this is not an oversight and we stand behind "use to."

Also, we need to get outside more often.

April Fools' roundup

Ah, April Fools' Day. Since the widespread use of the Internet, all kinds of hucksters have taken their pranks online, trying to get us to believe that they've invented a web-based time machine, that there's water on Mars, or that future radio personality Rachel Maddow has been born.



We realize we could have messed with you, faithful Plinky user, but we chose not to. Mostly because we thought of it too late. Instead, we decided to collect April Fools' pranks from you. And we got some good ones:

• Angelika, theformerprophet, einsteinsgirl and lots of other people liked Google's Gmail autopilot and other pranks.
• While Google didn't fool him, ThinkGeek had jderrisward whipping out his credit card to purchase the unpurchaseable ice dagger mold and tauntaun sleeping bag.
• What Kiki thought was going to be a "funny ha-ha" prank turned into perhaps a "not that funny and I lost my boyfriend" one.
• At the risk of giving Skorp too big a head by mentioning him twice on this blog, we must also give a nod to his beautifully executed rebuttal to a weak prank on him.

Now everybody please return to being serious for the next 364 days.

Welcome guest contributor Maggie Mason

This week, we're trying something new. While all of our prompts to date have been written in-house, prompts from March 23-29 were written by a very special guest contributor, Plinky advisor and blogger extraordinaire Maggie Mason.

Maggie has been blogging at Mighty Girl since 2000, back when you had to explain what a "blog" was. Her shopping sites, Mighty Goods, Mighty Junior and Mighty Haus, all provide tasteful, keen-eyed guidance to the confusing world of online shopping. Her book, "No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog", was a major source of inspiration for Plinky.

For all these reasons (plus she's the life of any party), we're proud to hand over the keys to Maggie this week. We recommend keeping your arms and legs inside the vehicle, just to be safe.

Plinky @ SXSW Interactive 2009

This weekend, Jason, Grant and Wesley are heading to the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin to hobnob with other web types, learn a thing or two, and hopefully find some inspiration in the Texas air. If you're going, too, join us at the 32 Bit party on Monday, March 16. We're co-sponsoring with Get Satisfaction, Laughing Squid, Lullabot, Sticker Giant, 30 Boxes, Automattic, Zynga, ShoutNow and Gowalla. Follow 32bit on Twitter for more details.

At the very least, try to track us down and make us give you a sticker or two. Also keep your eyes peeled for some exciting news about us after SXSW.