Woohoo! We just sent out invitations to the first 43 people who signed up to try out the new site. These are the first 43 people that we potentially don’t know, so I’m very exciting to get a bit of feedback from the new folks.
More will be added every day until we launch… so if you haven’t gotten your invitation yet, it should be coming soon.
How about collaboratively filtering everyone’s 43 things?<br />
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In other words, the site would take your list of 43 things, compare it to every one else’s list, and show you a list of the users who most closely match your list, ranked by how similarity. It would be great, if those users all had profiles where they could describe themselves. Then, you could browse through profiles to find the kinds of people who want the same things out of life that you do.<br />
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You could refine the process, by letting users sugget other questions than just ‘What do you want to do with your life?” like:<br />
– What do you want to do with your life, in the next 5 years? – What do you want to do with your professional life, before you retire? – Where do you want to travel? – And so on.<br />
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If users pick the questions and answers that they value, while the site collaboratively filters them, then like-minded users (meaning, users who picked similar questions with similar answers) will easily find each other, and voila! A tool to let people find others who share their values. It would allow inidividual users to self-organize into large self-defined demographics, based on values, rather than gender, age, income, etc. It woul be a launch.com or last.fm that brings people together based on shared values, rather than shared musical tastes.<br />
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Users who use the site to find others who share their values will have to use trial and error to find the types of questions/answers that lead them to the types of people that they feel most share their values. So, by allowing the user to find others who share his/her values, the site incents the user to narrow down the questions/answers that are most important in himself/herself, while not being so narrow as to not overlap with any other users.<br />
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Also, you could increase the granularity of the collaborative filtering, by allowing users to rank items by importance, within their particular lists. For example, if the question is “What do you want to do with your life?” you might rank “to be happy” as “Very Important”, whereas “to be rich” might be only “not important”. Then, when your list is compared with others, those with similar rankings are matched more closely to you than others.
I just started playing with it.. <br />
It is really cool and well done, except that marking a goal as “not done” is quit hard (after setting it “done” by error)
Abe… your brain thinks very similar to my own. Some of the features that you hint at go back to the very foundation of our idea and why we wanted to start working on it in the first place. What we’re launching now is definitely just the first step… and even though we don’t have a definite second step planned out, thinking about the options is quite exciting to all of us.<br />
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Gabriele, good point. I’ll look into trying to make that a bit easier. Any suggestions?
I’ve followed the robotcoop blog for a while now, and found your ideas and writing quite interesting, although I never really understood what you were doing, and didn’t get a grasp on the whole twinkler thing.<br />
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But after trying out hugster now, I’m amazed. It’s really great what technology can enable and convey to people.<br />
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But for making Hugster a success I think you should find better explanations for the masses. The concept, and more importantly the experience, comes easy to you, when you use it, but it’s hard to understand in written words.
well, I think the point is that <br />
‘You’ve done this! “Worth doing!” (Edit)’ conveys to me the idea that I can just change the evaluation of the goal, while ‘edit your last entry’ does not allow you to change the state of the goal.<br />
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So I think adding “I’m not finished with this goal” to that page would be useful. Maybe adding a tiny red box/link near <br />
“Congratulations! You’ve done this:<br />
foobar” with something like ”(<em>not really</em>)”
I just discovered that when I use 43Things to post to my blog, the post is Textile-formatted. That’s …. hhm, let’s say “not optimal”, as I don’t use the Textile plugin. <br />
So maybe it would be a good idea to make the format of the entries, which get posted to blogs, configurable (HTML, Textile …).<br />
Thank you!<br />
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P.S. I wrote it here, because I forgot the email-address for feedback.
Where are the ‘leave feedback’ links on 43 things?
Excellent site, why are some of the things bigger than others (in size) on the page?!?!? LOL, whatever the reason, it’s a good thing. I can see this going places..!
Thanks a lot! I just received the invitation and I’m spreading 43 things here in Brazil.
btw, I hope you guys can protect the system from some people from my country who are completely retarded and think the world is made for their stupid bullshit.<br />
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Just see what happened on Orkut.
Hey Pedro,<br />
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We’re aware of the issues Orkut had with localization. We have a solution in mind that should serve everyone’s needs. Thanks for the heads up.
Benjamin, thanks for the feedback on getting a good explanation out there. We’re working on that now. Also, I’ll see if we can find a way to make it so that the right formatting gets posted to your blog… we can make it a configuration option, but we’ll look at other options as well.<br />
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Awu, yeah, we need to make it easier to leave feedback. For now, feel free to write to me at erik at robotcoop dot com. Or to joshp@ or daniel@ or any of the other robots.
Immediate thoughts about 43 Things.<br />
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1. Everyone will have different views but these are mine, for what it’s worth…<br />
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2. You need a feedback facility that is more obvious than this blog. <br />
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3. “Things” need to be separated into simple targets with dates and details attached. That way the tagging taxonomy will generate more/less overlap as required. eg Start/Improve my/our flower business/relationship/in Jan 2006/ needs to be broken down into something like an English sentence:<br />
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Subject: I/You/My Friends<br />
Adverb: Quickly/<br />
Verb: Start/Finish/Improve/Grow<br />
Adjective: Flower/<br />
Object: Business/Relationship<br />
Target Date: Jan 2006<br />
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Tags seems to head in this direction but the framework doesn’t encourage people to use them… yet. And there doesn’t seem to be a target date/calendar facility/task review system… yet.
You could turn this into some sort of match making service.<br />