We’ve all heard of the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line, but did you know that now you can get text messages from Butterball reminding you to start thawing your turkey and what temperature it should cook at? At Butterball.com (also available in a mobile version) you can also watch how-to videos and participate in live chats to ensure your turkey is as delectable as possible this Thanksgiving.

Butterball really understands that the world is evolving and how people are using new resources to find information these days.  When the Turkey Talk-Line was launched 28 years ago in 1981, that was the best way for a consumer to get information. But with the growth of the internet, people are now searching online for videos, testimonials and recipes like never before. I personally don’t own a cookbook I use regularly – Instead, I just search online for recipes. Where did I find my pie recipes for an early Thanksgiving this year? AllRecipes.com and FoodNetwork.com.

NOTE: Read the entire article to learn how to get a free pizza the day before Thanksgiving from Papa Johns!

Twitter is one of the biggest things to engage in online today.

Three years go, Myspace was.

You remember Myspace, don’t you? The last, “really important site your business has to be on if you expect to be anywhere with the kids?”

Twitter is going to shuffle along before too long as well. And before you start writing your flame comments, know that I do like Twitter - I just see it in a very non-fanboy way, and as such must call out the problem as I see it: Twitter is no longer about communicating, but prestige.

Specifically, the prestige of showing how many followers you can rustle up. If you can show the world how 2000 people are really interested in what you have to say, and what’s more you yourself only find 60 other people worthy of reading, then you’re a pretty special someone.

On the other hand, if you are following 2000 people, it’s pretty obvious you do that to get anyone to follow you back - and show the world how you’re not completely invisible. (If you are following 2000 people, though, and only 143 are following you back, it sure doesn’t look much better.)

If you’re somewhere in the middle of that, you probably have, say, 300 people you follow and 200 or so who follow you back. Even so, that means there are 200 people’s updates streaming across your Twitter page each day, and you aren’t reading all of their posts. That’s because it isn’t important to anyone to read all of those updates.

It’s rather like bragging about how many e-mail address you have in your contacts list. Sure you never write to any of them, and when they write you the message is almost immediately deleted… but just LOOK AT ALL THOSE ADDRESSES! You must be pretty special, eh?

Here’s where I’m going with all of this: Twitter is slowly dying, not because the site is doing something wrong or the technology is bad. Neither is the case, Twitter hardly ever gives the Fail Whale anymore, and it gives people pretty much everything it says it will.

It is the culture of Twitter, however, that is failing. Like a pyramid scheme, everyone is relying on a large number of people a little further down to pick up on what they are doing, and follow it. Little important information is shared, though, and if it is it gets lost, or gets re-reported in more manageable sources. I’m sure Obama’s campaign announced some important stuff on Twitter - but if I heard of it, I heard it off the news. And I was even following!

There are quite a few other sites that are jockeying for possition already to be the “next Twitter.” Success for them will mean who adopts them in as great of numbers, but succuss could also mean which one gets the concept of “social” as being more than having a heap of friends you never listen to.

In the case of social media, a definite problem is having too many people to listen to. There is no more filtering agent if you follow just one more person than you have the time to read - even at 140 characters. The next sites will either hide the number of friends you have from the public - which would take the impetus out of getting too many friends - or change the technology used so it would be at least possible to listen to that many updates. (Friendfeed, 12seconds.tv and Utterli.com come to mind.)

Robert Scoble’s Twitter account follows 20,969 individual accounts as of this posting. Unless he has a staff sifting through all of those posts, he does not see everything his chosen friends are saying in a day. And if he does, he is intimately aware only of how many of them are watching TV, or just got to work, or are sleepey, bored, have the flu… things no one NEEDS to be on top of, and things that surely don’t require a staff.

In short, a lot of things that aren’t worth the trouble of maintaining a Twitter account. Don’t get me wrong, Twitter does have it’s value. The way everyone else uses it, though, that value is rather limited.

Disneyland is wasted on the young.

I learned that a couple of weeks ago when, for the first time in my life, I went to Disneyland and liked it. When I went, I was Brightkite-ing up a storm - keeping tabs on the rides I was going on, pictures of neat stuff, etc. The one thing I couldn’t do was placemark the individual rides I went on, because they don’t have their own individual addresses.

Now news comes that Verizon and Disney are striking a deal, where Verizon customers can have an applicaion added to their phones that will allow visitors to track where they are, wait times on rides, where Mickey is, etc.

Now THAT’S the way to do mobile marketing! Be a company that, for whatever reason, covers a large area and has a lot of foot traffic. Then make it so your walking is tied into your phone. This is why I was so keen on tracking my Disneyland trip on Brightkite, as it allowed me not only to take the same kind of tourist pictures everyone takes, but I could post them immediately and get comments from others on them in real time.

Add in the GPS-like tracking within the park, and the phone becomes a very convenient way to enjoy the park. This is what will make mobile marketing work: When you have captive foot traffic that is willing and interested in using their phone for something other than calling. It works for Verizon too, though, if they decide to turn this kind of technology into their own community, just like Brightkite.

Another idea that comes to mind are coupons that display on the phone. Instead of having the speedpass machine at the ride give you a ticket that you can loose, a phone app displays an image with your specific wait time and ride on it that you show at the gate. Then when they see that your phone is on the ride via the same proximity mapping, they “tear” your ticket and mark your phone-displayed pass as used. They can also monitor your phone to make sure you don’t sign up for a bunch of Speedpasses at once, which bogs down the system and screws it up for everyone.

Google just updated their iGoogle layout a couple of minutes ago. There are two distinct changes, and in my opinion one’s good - and the other’s a drag.

First off, you can now edit your Gmail through the iGoogle page, which is very nice. Before you had to click over to your Gmail to do any deleting. Even if you opened the message through iGoogle, you didn’t have the option of deleting anything that was junk - just archiving it, which Google seems to think is the best possible thing you could do with your mail. I don’t know, I’d rather purge what I don’t need, but that could just be me.

Second, a change I am not wild about - the tabs organization is now an entire column on the left. Given how crowded this page can get for those of us who use it a lot, this is a bad turn. What’s more, the option to “delete” it does not refer to the column, but the actual tab information. So I have a feeling a lot of people who also don’t like this new layout are going to end up deleting their front page tab. Here’s hoping they think to click the “undo” link at the top of the screen after they do.

E

For those of you who have a preference for international news, it can be annoying when the Today show spends more time discussing how to make a fun fiesta casserole rather than updating you on the current situation in Chechnya or when your local paper gives you little more than one page about the state of the international community. Several newspapers, news television programs, and online news websites leave international news at the bottom of their priority list. There are, however, a few news websites that seem to always deliver.

The International Herald Tribune online is the global edition of the New York Times online, and it dedicates every story and landing page to news on the international level. Unfortunately, the New York Times will soon be taking the International Herald site down, a huge loss for those who value international news. Not only does this mean more traffic to the Times site, but also more advertising dollars in their pocket. To be fair, the present economic situation calls for drastic measures and the Times have claimed that they will be adding a bit more international news to their site. In my opinion, however, this also means that international news will now come second to stories about Sarah Palin, Thanksgiving party ideas, and some celebrity’s drug addiction – all of which I actually discovered on the site’s homepage.

Despite some bitterness on my part, there is valuable national news on the Times site, and detailed news about politics, economics, sports, science, technology, style, and more. Perhaps I am just demanding.

Either way, it is comforting to know that- at least for now- the Paris-based International Herald Tribune will not be shutting down along with its website. Meanwhile, I highly recommend BBC online for legitimate and thorough international news. Today they are featuring Nobel Prize winners who have baked up more than a miracle diet plan. Check it out.

Can your business be confusing, or do you just think you could explain it better in claymation? Well, at Claytorial, you can find out. Claytorial takes your business and creates a visual idea storyboard using drawings, which are then animated for you to place on your site. Visit the Claytorial home page to see an example done for Tagga.com, a real world text messaging service.

The way people experience Web sites now, no on spends time reading through an entire Web site if it is all in paragraph format. They skim the copy for words that pop out, bullet points and images, especially videos. As a visual learner myself, I would rather watch a video on a site, then read multiple paragraphs of copy.

And now you, in three easy steps, can claymate your business!