Last week I found out about Movember through my friend and partner Fernando Labastida. Movember is one of those non-profit movements that successfully uses social media and content marketing to engage with the community and spread the word.

But what’s this Movember thing?

Movember (the month formerly known as November) is a mustache growing charity event held during November each year that raises funds and awareness for men’s health.

What I really like about Movember is how they encourage people to donate. If you signup at their website, you’ll be able to form a team or join an existing one. Usually, teams are formed by people that actually know each other in the real world. Once in the team, you can see how others are contributing to the cause, both in terms of mustache growing and in cash donations.

The cool thing is that, once you know how others are contributing, you modify your own behavior in favor of the cause and you end up donating more than you would there was no such peer competition.

Social mechanisms are really powerful, and with the right tools, these can be used in the web, thus providing a very compelling experience.

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/teamaskins/309009728/

We Feel Fine is a collection of messages posted by regular people around the world. The interesting part, is that they were mined and categorized depending on the feelings expressed. There are “sad” or “depressed ” messages, as there are “happy” messages.

Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

There are two things that I want to highlight about this project:

1. They present the information in a very friendly and beautiful way. The visualization work that is on top of all this data is just brilliant. You have to experience it.

2. They provide an API that give developers across the web the possibility to use the data and extend the experience with their own creations.

We Feel Fine is a great example of a great experience powered by a simple, yet very powerful piece of technology. If you have some time to spare, visit their site and look by yourself. Plus, they just published a very nice book.