Category Archives: Thoughts

One day we were talking about creating a community genealogy site to help people track family trees, and we came up with this wacky feature on 43 People:

Your family (or rather, my family).

You can add your parents, your children, your pets, significant others, and even exes. Check out Brad Pitt’s family.

If your parents have parents, they’ll show up as grandparents on your page, and if your children have children, they’ll show up as grandchildren.

This feature is a bit hidden at the moment, but give it a try and see if anything funny or surprising happens. We’ll probably continue to fiddle with it, so let us know if you’d like to see anything else family related on any of our sites.

Bonus family feature

If your family members have 43 Things accounts, you can filter All Consuming activity to show only items consumed and being consumed by family members. Just select “by people in my family” in the second dropdown (you’ll have to be logged in to see the dropdown).

We’re not very good at letting people know about new features are out there, so I’d like to try and remedy that in this new year by highlighting a feature every day or so that might’ve otherwise slipped by unnoticed. To start, here’s one of my favorite, yet obscure, features that some people might find useful if you have several different places around the internet that you write and post stuff.

Add an RSS feed to your account

If you’re not familiar with RSS, here’s a good explanation. We try to keep it as hidden away as possible, but for those that do care, here are some interesting things we’re doing with it.

As you may or may not know, you can add RSS feeds to your account on 43 People (go to your page, click “View your recent entries”, and then “Add a feed to your account”). From here, you can add any RSS feed from anywhere on the internet (your blog, your del.icio.us account, your library, etc). It will automatically have all of your 43 Things/Places/People and All Consuming feeds, as well as your Flickr feed if you have given us your screen name, but since I’m an RSS MANIAC I’ve also added feeds from my library, my Live Journal, my TypePad blog, my Tada Lists, and my NetFlix activity. (Here’s my page if you’re curious to see how this ends up looking.)

Subscribe to me instead of to an RSS feed

The great thing about this (in my opinion) is that people can then subscribe to ME, rather than my feeds. I think people are more interesting than RSS feeds… and when people move around, I don’t have to worry about updating all the feeds. When I get a new account somewhere (hey, look, Yahoo Answers has an RSS feed for all my questions!) I can add it and everyone that’s subscribed to me now gets this new content.

Choose only what you want

Now, some people (like me) probably are a little overzealous about adding content… so there’s a chance that you don’t actually want to see every blurry camera phone picture I post. For cases like this, you can unsubscribe from particular feeds within a person’s set of feeds and still be subscribed to the person as a whole. You do this by clicking on their name in the sidebar and selecting only the content that you want.

Your subscriptions page

If you’re subscribed to me and 100 other people, you can get an up-to-date list of all the entries from your subscriptions page. Or, you can export the content as a new uber feed and read it in your RSS reader of choice.

Add feeds to other people’s pages

You can add feeds to anyone’s page, not just your own. And, if you want to read feeds by people that don’t have a 43 Things account, you can do that too. For example, here’s Miranda July’s feed page. ))<>(( Forever!

Random bonus NetFlix feature

If you have a NetFlix account and add your NetFlix “Most Recent Rental Activity” feed (available from this page), we’ll automatically mark movies that are shipped to you as “I am consuming this” on All Consuming account. When you ship them back, we’ll mark them as “I have consumed this”. We love combining things like this… even if only 5 people are using it at the moment. If you are one of those 5 people, enjoy!

RSS is made out of people! Okay, time for lunch… I hope I don’t lose at credit card roulette as I need money for tonight’s one-year anniversary party. Hope to see you there if you’re in Seattle.

Back in the day Erik was first building All Consuming he was thinking of it as a way to let people share the experience of a book while they read it. So for historical reason’s the first link is “I’m consuming this”. In 43 fashion, we matched the link with “I have consumed this”. Now we are thinking about changing the first link to “I want to consume this”.

Is that how you are already using All Consuming? Would you get more value out of keeping a list of what you want to consume or do you use the list to keep track of your current reading/watching/listening.

Let us know how you use All Consuming.

From my inbox yesterday …

From: (name omitted)
Subject: Your domain 43things.com
Date: October 27, 2005 4:30:55 PM PDT
To: Daniel Spils

Hello,

I am interested in purchasing your domain name,
43things.com.

Would you be interested in selling? I’m interested in
the domain name itself (not any site content).

If interested let me know. Also, if you can provide an
asking price or a ballpark figure that would be
appreciated but not neccesary.

Thank you,

(name omitted)

Here’s the current themesong for what we are brewing at the co-op (hint: check out the top goal today over on 43 Things).

Little Room

Well you’re in your little room
and you’re working on something good
but if it’s really good
you’re gonna need a bigger room
and when you’re in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started in your little room

- White Stripes, Little Room

This week several numbers reached coincidental roundedness which is as good a reason as any to celebrate:

• 25,000 registered accounts, the 25,000th of which was yeled.
• 100,000 unique goals (with at least one person still on it), the 100,000th of which was to only check email twice a day.
• 300,000 goals have been added to peoples’ lists, and the 300,000th adopted goal was bapa’s desire to take another art class.

With the change of seasons comes a new crop of sites springing up. Here is a list of sites I’m looking forward to checking out:

1. Backpack
2. Odeo
3. 360.yahoo.com
4. EVDB
5. Jobster
6. Trumba
7. jotspot

What sites are you looking forward to?

If internet 1.0 was mostly about making the internet work for business, internet 2.0 seems to me to be more about making it work for people – and part of that shift means some tectonic changes in the relationships between individuals and the corporations that earn their custom. The Cluetrain told us this was coming: markets are conversations. So, I’m interested in adding to a conversation around the shift from privacy to publicity and hearing from you what you think about the idea of a “publicity policy” that helps inform users how sites like 43 Things operate.

A great example of the shift I’m thinking about can be seen in comparing the first generation photo sites (Ofoto, Snapfish, etc) vs. the second generation photo sites like Flickr or Fotolog. When Ofoto debuted, the experience was 95% commerce and 5% community. The focus was on ordering prints, with a secondary user experience that would let your friends and family see your photos online (and of course, order more prints). The site was built around private transactions – your photos and your credit card. The onus was on the company not to share your information with anyone you didn’t authorize and “privacy policies” became de rigeur on commercial sites.

Flickr stood the Ofoto model on its head. The site is organized around public displays of photos and the emergent community of enthusiasts who admire, congratulate and encourage each other. The site isn’t built around keeping your photos private (though the option is there) – it is built around helping you make them public – and in doing so, publicizing who you are and what you care about. Through the emergent interactions of tags, comments, profile pages and social networks, publicizing your photos can lead to finding other people who are sharing their photos and a meaningful sense of community can emerge. The first generation concern about safeguarding private transactions has largely been transformed into a second generation invitation to meet the neighbors.

This pattern can be seen all over Web 2.0. Is there a privacy concern at Meetup, Audioscrobbler or 43 Things – where people can actually meet you in the flesh, learn what you are listening to and even discover your personal goals? I don’t think any of these sites are about privacy – they are about publicity. They are about how when you disclose bits about your personality and interests, you can start to connect with others (in person or virtually) who share common experiences and interests. Part of what is happening on the web today, through folksonomies, blogs, social networks, link sharing and photo sharing are new ways for people to disclose their personalities in public and new ways to develop a digital identity that might augment who we are as people, offline.

There’s an old New Yorker cartoon that shows some dogs at a computer with the caption “on the internet, no one knows you are a dog”. It’s a Web 1.0 joke about privacy and anonymity. But today, with the rise of blogs and websites like Flickr, del.icio.us and 43 Things, the joke is, “offline, no one knows you are a talented photographer, that you want to learn Italian, that you discover great links or know some great people”. For now, “The Real World” still requires you to check your virtual aspirations and accomplishments at the edge of the internet. You can’t convert your whuffie just yet. But millions of people are building online identities and reputations that are accumulating meaning and value. That value gets created as we build an online reputation, as we move our private knowledge into the public domain. The issues that this brings up get lost when the only policy folks have to reference is a “privacy policy”. Perhaps we need a “publicity policy” for 2.0 websites.

A publicity policy could make clear that information on 43 Things is public: that the site is about sharing your goals with others; that using the site is voluntary and that you shouldn’t use it if you don’t want to; that by sharing information on 43 Things, you aren’t sharing anything private that we promise to safeguard, but rather you are making your information public and it will show up in the Google index, cache and internet archive.

Privacy policies focus on what happens to your private information. But a publicity policy could make clear what the implications are of sharing information in public. Maybe it needs to be pointed out that you don’t have to use your real name or that you can get a free email account to separate your pseudonym from any other account? Maybe we should scrap the email requirement so that no personal information is required at all to use 43 Things? Maybe we should add Creative Commons licenses to all the content to make it remixable with attribution and do away with the idea that the data is “owned” by anyone in an exclusive sense?

Now surely a part of this concern about privacy is about the fact that The Robot Co-op is funded by Amazon.com and that the facts of that funding emerged in some sensationalist press before either company had issued a press release on the deal. Live and learn on that front. But perhaps we could put the matter to rest by making it clear that no personal information is required (or desired) to use 43 Things and that Amazon.com would have no access to any information that isn’t already available to the rest of the world, through an individual’s decision to publicize that information.

It’s kind of crazy to think that people want to publicize their goals but maintain complete privacy, but we are willing to help! We are kind of into kind of crazy. What I do think we need is a new awareness about how publicity works in an era when sharing what was previously private can lead to new forms of identity, reputation and community.

What do you think?

I’m going to be in Austin for SXSW Interactive through Sunday night and then over in San Diego for the Emerging Technology Conference to participate in a tutorial on Web Services (at 8:30am on Monday, yikes!). If any of you end up making the tutorial or spot me in the halls, definitely come up and say hi. I’ll be around for the rest of the Etech conference as well.

Odeo rides out on rails today, cruising into TED, and debuting on the NYT tech page. Wow! What a start. Congrats to Ev, Rabble, and the rest of the team.

Congrats to DHH as well – there are 223 more people that want to build an application on rails, lots of amazing stuff to come.

As someone with the goal of being fluent in Italian, the coolest thing that happened to 43 Things this week was this great article in La Repubblica: