This week was busy. What started as a simple question, “Can we use the Twitter API to create useful twitter events?” turned into a week of marathon coding to see an idea come to fruition. Enter hashtagscoialmedia.com (#socialmedia). #Socialmedia is a site that offers a window in to the hashtag social media. It creates an organized, automatically updating experience  to follow the social media discussion on Twitter. #SocialMedia will also host weekly events for all to participate. We will record those events for reference and encourage feedback for future events. Head over to hashtagsocialmedia.com next Tuesday at noon to join the social media discussion.

There are still a few bugs to work out and features to add, but why hold back a good idea.

I have spent the last week working with the twitter search API. I have to say that I think it is a very accessible API. I was able to pick it up and start developing within the hour.  In fact I will be announcing a new twitter app/site  in partnership with @marc_meyer and @jasonbreed. So look for that announcement later today.

All in all I have to say I am amazed by how much demand twitter supports. The API allows us to query twitter aggressively.  Many people complain when twitter goes down but considering how much they are delivery through their site and API I am surprised it does not go down more often.

Microsoft released a web based version of The World Wide Telescope today. The World Wide Telescope is a Microsoft Research projects that basically takes all of the high quality images of the known galaxy/universe/etc… and stitches them together into an amazing user interface. The Desktop client is very impressive and is a great experience if you have a powerful video card and processor.

One of the great things about this is tat users can create tours of tours of constellations and other celestial bodies and share them with the world.
It create more of a community feel and gives you a reason to come back often.

The web client can be found here:
http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/ .

It looks like it supports everything found in the desktop application. The web client is running off of Silverlight. Silverlight is an animation / rich interface platform that competes with Adobe Flash. To be honest this is the most notable use of Silverlight that I am aware of. It is pretty impressive none the less.

This year, one of my projects was named a finalist for the SxSW interactive web awards.
The project was www.lynnMarieSmith.net

I Iwas fortunate enough to get the chance to attend a few days of SxSW as well as the Award Ceremony.
The award Ceremony perfect. An excellent emcee, Baratunde Thurston, kept the event light, intelligent, entertaining and and fast paced. No one likes a 5 hour drawn out award ceremony. If you do not know Baratunde Thurston, get to know him here: http://baratunde.com/blog/ . It is worth the effort.

Unfortunately www.LynnMarieSmith.net was not a winner this year. www.Alifelski.com took home the award for the personal portfolio category. I was pretty sure that if we did not win, she would. And vice versa. Her design is original, well thought out and overall pleasing.
So Congrats Ali!

This site is worth a few minutes of your time to day. www.thefwa.com has named it the site of the day.

The video interface and music comes together ro create a fairly seemless and immersive experience.