TeamSnap, a product of Portland-based SparkPlug is the second northwest site on TechCrunch today and is enjoying a much smoother launch than TalentSpring’s. I saw TeamSnap on Mike Davidson’s blog the other day and it definitely is a good-looking site, but didn’t realize they were local. Congrats on the launch SparkPlug! I used to play a lot of sports and do a little coaching before I got bit by the side-project entrepreneur bug, but not enough to warrant the use of TeamSnap.

I’m not sure if TechCrunch jumped the gun, but boy is TalentSpring awful. I noticed that TalentSpring is a northwest company (Seattle), which made me want to check it out, as I don’t bother with most of the stuff that comes through TechCrunch these days. Though I can’t speak much for the business and/or idea itself, as I’m not totally sure what the point of it all is yet. It seems slightly interesting, but the TalentSpring site itself is so unusable right now, I have no motivation to explore.

UPDATE: It appears to be working again today (Saturday, 3 days after the first reports). I wasn’t able to make the switch to Google’s yet, so I’ll still use Yahoo’s for now. But, there are some changes I need to make to better prepare if something like this happens again. Yahoo rolled out some updates to their Maps API on Tuesday night, but unfortunately they broke their Geocode API in the process.

The folks at Pop Art have launched a new group, PDX UX (UX = User Experience), for area designers and developers to get together (via). Looks to be heavy on Microsoft stuff. That’s not an indictment against the group (I code in .NET for a living as a matter of fact), but I do know that many developers dislike Microsoft’s proprietary ways and many designers dislike working with Microsoft technology. So, it will be interesting to see how it does.

You want irony? On the day I drive 90 minutes to the convention center and nearly 2 hours to get home, I do a brief interview with an Oregonian reporter about my 25 minute daily work commute. Doesn’t seem so bad now :-). Let’s recap day 2: Let Go! 8 Steps to Succeeding in a Post-2.0 World Lane Becker and Thor Muller, Satisfaction (slides) I didn’t write down the 8 specific things, perhaps they’ll show up here, but this talk wasn’t really about presenting the 8 things, it was more a conversation about their message, “Be Like the Internet.