Author Archives: yolfer

Update: Thanks to the sharp eyes of a few folks, the “Invite someone” link is back. We’d accidentally removed it, so now it’s inside the “Sharing” area. Also, updated the wording about “mature” for clarity. /Update

Another tweak to the new sharing buttons is rolling live right now. To improve understanding of the feature’s purpose and to make the links less visually distracting, the buttons are now contained behind a link that says “Share this goal with others” (this link replaced the “Invite someone” link). Clicking “Share this goal with others” reveals the share buttons.

Also, the share buttons are gone from all profile and progress pages, and from “mature” goals. They are only on “G rated” goal pages.*

The aim of these buttons was to update the share-via-email function to reflect people’s sharing behaviors in this day and age. The initial rollout of these buttons was far from perfect. We apologize for the trouble we’ve caused, and we’ll keep making changes to the site until we get to a better place. We’ll never be able to completely satisfy every concern of every person, but we hope we can substantially address them.

* Mature goals are goals that are flagged by a pretty unsophisticated computer program as potentially having content that not everyone would want to see. You can toggle whether or not you see mature content on your account settings page.

Now you can get an email each time you’re cheered on 43 Things. Check out the new options under Your Account > Edit Account

You can get emails right away, or on a daily basis, or a weekly basis, or any combination of the three. Cheers!

We appreciate the feedback, both positive and negative, on the new sharing feature. Just like any change to 43 Things, we’ll make tweaks to it based on feedback. Whenever we make a change to the site we are always reminded how hard change can be for some. But we have to remember that 43 Things is the sum of all these changes.

If the past is a guide, most people will adjust to changes to the site and a few people will not. But that is the way of building something like 43 Things. We know we can’t please everybody. But we promise to keep listening.

We want to explain a bit more about why we are trying to make it easier to share links from our site. Sharing has always been a part of the site, which at its core is all about going public with your goals. Since we launched over 6 years ago, we’ve always made it easy to share links to our site. When we started back in 2005, viewers of the site could do this in email. Now we’ve caught up to a time where The Facebook Wall and Twitter have become as important as email. Members of 43 Things can and do post links to our site on Twitter and Facebook (and we enjoy reading them daily!). Those links bring new visitors to 43 Things. When we are done fine-tuning the new sharing links, we hope more members of our site will spread the word about interesting goals they find on 43 Things. We always aim to reach people where they are and draw them in to the 43 Things community. We think the more people who share goals the better and that is why we’ve never created the sort of private and permissioned features that are found on other sites.

Sharing content in email, on your blog, or on sites like Twitter and Facebook has always been 100% optional. You can still use the site with a pseudonym and never connect it to any other account. You don’t need an account at any third party site to use 43Things. And you don’t have to share anything.

Lastly, if enhanced sharing links are making you rethink the content you’ve been adding to 43 Things, either we’ve failed to communicate to you how your content is already discoverable on the Internet, or you are posting stuff publicly that you would prefer was kept private. We’ve heard from folks who say they fear losing a job or a relationship if the wrong person reads their post. It’s important to understand that those people could read your posts prior to this new feature. If a member of 43 Things has put themselves in this position by publicly posting content they don’t want others to read or share, now might be a great time for them to think about what is their most prudent use of 43 Things.

A final word on change and communication. We should have done better from the start explaining our change to the site. For that we owe you all an apology. As always, we will aim to keep doing better.

We’re pleased to announce a new way to share your progress on 43 Things with the world. On every goal page, you’ll now see a set of buttons that enable you to share the goal with Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other social applications. We’re also experimenting with them on profile and entry pages, but they may come and go depending on usage and usability.

As one of the first “social networking” sites on the web, we feel strongly about the freedom that this medium gives our users to broadcast to the world their hopes and dreams, trials and tribulations. One of the founding tenets of 43 Things is that broadcasting to the world that you’re trying to accomplish a goal is one of the best ways to keep yourself accountable for completing it.

Using these buttons is optional, and your content always remains on 43 Things. The buttons simply post a link to 43 Things onto the social networking site of your choice. If someone else clicks one of the share buttons on content of yours, it’s posted to the other person’s social networking profile, not your own. In this way, if you choose not to use the share buttons, your 43 Things persona stays separate from your other online personas.

(If you’re really into sharing, did you know you can link your 43 Things account with Facebook? The settings are in: Your Account > Facebook Settings)

We used to have a water cooler problem, in that we didn’t have a water cooler. Now–like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice–we seem to be getting water delivered at an alarming rate!

We’re all for drinking more water, just not this much.

Yesterday we launched a pretty major release to 43 Places. This post will run down the improvements, and what they mean to you.

Jumpstart for new users

Jumpstart is a feature for new users that helps them dive into 43 Places and easily build their travel list. When a new user comes to the home page, they’ll see a fun display of all continents on Earth. From there they can select which continents they’ve visited, then which countries on those continents. After they’ve finished they can save their info by creating an account (with Facebook, if they want), and share their travel list with friends.

New Q&A

One of our main goals on 43 Places is to connect travelers (and armchair travelers) to people knowledgeable about every corner of the globe, and to give travel enthusiasts a forum to catalog their travel experience. One of the ways people can do that on 43 Places is by asking and answering travel questions.

We revamped the Q&A section of the site, making it easier to target your questions to people knowledgable about a particular region, and for travel enthusiasts to see which questions have been asked about areas they’re familiar with.

Give it a try, I think you’ll be surprised with what you can learn!

Sign in with Facebook

You can now use your Facebook account to sign in to 43 Places, or create a new 43 Places account. If you already have a 43 Places account, you can still use Facebook to sign in, or just sign in with your 43 Places username and password like before. It’s up to you!

Above, you can see the “Login with Facebook” button at the top of every page, and the login popup that now contians the option to login with Facebook instead of your username and password.

List reorder

You can now reorder the items on your travel lists. Just look for the little “reorder” icon to the right of each place name. It’s not available on every list, we’re working on that.

(PS: Have you tried making a travel list yet? It’s fun and easy.)

Bug fixes, etc.
A number of bug fixes went into this release. If there was something bothering you about the site, take a look and see if it’s been fixed. Many of the bugs were spotted by our users, so if you see anything strange on the site, please let us know!