Pangea Day

Yesterday I attended a unique event - Pangea Day. The name refers to the super-continent that existed 250 million years ago (Paleozoic/Mesozoic era) before our five continents had separated to the current constellation. As you can guess the name was chosen to represent the connectedness between the origins of us all.

The idea behind the event was to bring together people from all around the world to share a unique media experience. Pangea Day was a celebration of the power of film. From a selection of 2000 international submissions the organizers chose 24 short films to show on the night. Live events were organized in Cairo, Kigali, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Rio and London with thousands of viewers. Moreover, the event was televised globally to be seen by millions.

The films, as diverse as they all were, made the participants feel closer to the world by focusing on human emotions as their main theme. Watch them here. My favorite feature was More written and directed by Mark Osborne. The Academy Award nominated film is recorded with stop motion. Watch it here. For those who like the song featured as background music, it's by New Order and called Elegia. Hopefully see you next year at the Pangea Day 2009!

Twitter

So if you haven't heard about Twitter yet, you must have just woke up from a long time coma. In that case welcome back and here a short low down on the service:

Twitter is basically a social micro blogging application that allows you to send out short bursts of information to your Twitter blog and everyone who has subscribed to it. It to a certain degree also resembles IM services as users can comment on someone else's blog entry. This comment will be shown in that persons Twitter blog and he could reply to the it.



One of the coolest things about Twitter, though, is their open API. Following the successful strategy of other open platforms (will be the topic of another blog entry) they allow 3rd party developers to use the data that Twitter generates and repackage it in a new way. This has lead to a load of new cool applications that are worth sharing here.

Twitterfox is basically an application that allows you to engage with the Twitter service without ever pulling up the Twitter web page. The great thing is that it is not another IM client that you have to install but sits neatly on the bottom bar of your Firefox window.

Twitterberry (link takes you to the download page for the Blackberry application) allows you to update your Twitter through the Blackberry. You can also see new Tweets that you have subscribed to coming in. This is a more comfortable way to Twitter than by writing SMS (which you can also use).

TwitterSynch updates your Tweets automatically as your Facebook status. In combination with Twitterfox you can then effectively update both your Twitter and Facebook status through your Firefox browser without having to leave your current web page.

Whoshouldifollow helps you find friends on Twitter. It looks at the people you currently follow and suggests other people that you could subscribe to.

Twitterholic is a page that gives you an overview over the most followed Twitter members and other interesting Twitter related statistics.

Summize is a very interesting service. It basically let's you search all public Tweets for a query that you define. This a great way to find out more about things but also a good way to find new Twitter users t follow.

Tweetmeme is basically bubbling up the most discussed topics and issues on Twitter by analyzing Tweets. It's a great way place to find interesting articles and web sites that seem to be all the rage without you knowing it.

Twitterlocal lets you find Twitter users in your vicinity.

Twistori is an atristic attempt to capture Tweets that contain the words love, hate, think, feel, believe and wish. It's very amusing way to waste time!

This is as you probably have imagined not an exhaustive list of applications built on the Twitter API. If you like to find out more I recommend this excellent article by the Guardian on the topic with loads of links at the bottom.