Monthly Archives: December 2004

Want to know what ~200,000 people say they want to do with their life?

I said earlier that I’d be happy opening up some of the data if people were interested in playing around with it. I got a few interested replies and since then I’ve been scratching my head about what exactly to give out. Too much data is overwhelming, not enough is restricting. So, I’m just doing the simplest thing and leaving it open for you to tell me what you want.

Double Pipe-delimited file (in the format of):

rank||# of people who have the goal||unique ID||name

http://robotcoop.com/data/twinkler_goals-12-08-2004.txt (572K)

With the unique ID, you can construct a URL to that thing’s page like this:

http://twinkler.43things.com/twinkler/thing/[ID]

Let me (erik at this domain) know if you do anything interesting with this. Also, if there’s different information that you think we have and which you want to do something fun with, let me know and I’ll try my best to give it to you.

We haven’t quite opened the floodgates on the Hugster beta yet. However, we’re still accepting people to sign up to be notified when we do. Anyone that has signed up is already first in line, of course. Looks like this will start happening for real early next week.

Many teams I’ve worked on in the past end up slipping their dates because they want to get that one last feature in … it’s quite the opposite over here. We’re busy taking features away, trying to whittle the site down to its essense.

43 Things/ Twinkler is teaching us a lot about the power of simplicity (not that we weren’t already eager students at this school). Strangely, our first prototype (Snuzzle) was the most feature-packed and the most lines of code. Twinkler is only 450 lines of code. Hugster will be one half the Snuzzle site as far as functionality is concerned (I’ll go into a list of features that have been temporarily pulled a bit later). I almost need three hands in order to count the number of fully-implemented features we’ve cut. It’s a joyous feeling. My only hope is that it’ll be 1/4th the site it once was by the time you see it … and that that 1/4th is the best 1/4th we can give you.

Walking to lunch at Ballet with my fellow Robots, I was recounting the film Kinsey which I had seen over the weekend. Prior to Dr. Kinsey, no one had taken a truly scientific approach to profiling human sexuality—Kinsey managed to cast a wide survey net with his now infamous human sexual behavior studies.

As fate would play out Seattle’s own love doctor, Dan Savage, was dining at the table north of the Robots as the conversation turned to 43 Things and Twinkler. We let Dan eat his pho in peace, but couldn’t help but draw the correlation of events: Kinsey’s landmark sex studies, Dan Savage’s hilarious sex column and the fact that in its first two weeks 43 Things had experienced a 9% goal adoption rate for the sexy and downright mature.