The Robot Co-op

We are rapidly coming up on the 5th anniversary of 43 Things’ appearance on the interweb. When we were first getting started, way back in 2004, we decided to put out a “primitive” version of the site. We code-named this experiment “Twinkler”.

“Twinkler” was a very basic version of 43 Things. This site let you make a list of your goals and told you how many people had the same goal in common. The site didn’t have accounts, reminders, entries, images, profile pages, search results, or any of the things you might expect a site like 43Things.com to have. What it did have was a big provocative question: “What do you want to do with your life?“

Within 43 days, more than 200,000 people had made a list of their goals on “Twinkler” and we knew we had an idea that was resonating with people all around the world. Five years later, over 2 million more people have used 43 Things to make a life list, a list of the goals they want to accomplish most. Since then, we’ve met users of 43 Things from all over the world, put out a book of goals submitted by users of 43 Things, and seen the site make differences in people’s live we never could have imagined 5 years ago.

To commemorate the last 5 years, we are bringing the simplicity of that first version of 43 Things to our site’s homepage for a few months while we celebrate our anniversary. At the end of the week you’ll see the homepage direct some attention on the question “What do you want to do in 2010?” We hope you enjoy our tribute to our humble beginnings as we re-connect with our past and we hope you’ll think about what you want out of the next year, as we celebrate 5 years of 43 Things.

Sorry for the slip up that led to a dust up but now it’s all fixed up. We were working on a new project (more on that in the next post) and we accidentally stepped on the “I’ve given up” tab.

We know folks keep track of given up goals for all kinds of reasons. Be assured, your given up goals never disappeared – just the tab that let you see them went missing. Now the tab is back, and you’ll be wondering, “How can 1 calorie taste so good?”

We try and keep our loyal readers abreast of what’s happening at the Co-op in our ongoing efforts to speed up the sites and make things easier to use and maintain. Today’s announcement concerns a test drive of a new navigation bar (navbar) we are working on. The new navbar is faster loading, less tall, and we think, a bit easier on the eyes. In terms of functionality, it is all the same, this is mostly about how it looks and the performance when you request a page. Because the navbar is such a focal part of the page, this test is one you will almost certainly notice.

We also wanted to tell you a bit more about the experiment, as it could prove a bit confusing as well. We’ll be introducing the new navbar through what is known as an A/B test. Half of the 43Things users will see the new navbar and the other half will see the same navbar we’ve been using for the last 9 months. This lets us measure the performance of each treatment and analyze the resorts accordingly. It also means you and a friend might not be seeing the same navbar at all. Or if you use one computer at work and another at home, the navbars you see may vary.

Thanks, in general, for being a part of the grand experiment that is 43 Things, and thanks specifically for bearing with us while we take the new navbar out for a spin.

Hold on to your hats folks. In our ongoing efforts to speed up the sites and simplify their operation we are “refactoring” a few things on the site related to goal adoption and goal counts (how many people are on a goal). Now if all goes smoothly, the net effect will be everything will function just as they did before, but with faster loading pages and less strain on the database. That ought to mean fewer “oops” pages. The change will be most evident on goals with lots of people and teams with lots of members.

Sounds great, right? So why the fuss? Well, because we are pretty much rerouting the oxygen intake for our dear 43Things the site (goal adoption) . We’ve tested the changes, double checked them, and we are feeling ready to roll them out. But if you see something go haywire in these 2 areas we’d love it if you let us know.

We are going to take all the sites down tonight at 10 pm Pacific time to do some database maintenance. We are sorry for the inconvenience and apologize for not giving you more advance notice. The upshot of all this is that 43Things should be faster when we come back online 1 hour later.

Our Load-balancer went all wonky and it took a bit of time to figure it out. It has now been reset, and things seem better. You should see no more “connection dropped” messages and all the edit links (etc.) should be working. Let us know if that is not the case, and thanks for flying with the Robots.

Have you ever heard the story of the note placed in a bottle and thrown into the ocean, only to be discovered years later, thousands of miles away, by the very same person who wrote it? Well what about that movie, An Affair to Remember, where Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant fall in love and promise to meet again 6 months later. Now that I think about it, it is sort of like that Sandra Bullock/Keanu Reeves remake The Lake House, where to destined lovers are separated by the improbable barrier of time and tied together by a magic mailbox.

Oh, man, I think I’ve lost my train of thought . . . . did I tell you how HOT it is in Seattle today?

Back to the story: when we were getting started on 43Things.com we built an early prototype and shared it with a small group of folks. Some gave us one or two suggestions and one guy gave us a whole list of 43ideas for our new site. That’s where the “message in a bottle” part comes in. We loved the ideas (and we’ve followed through on some) and we promised to keep track of this list (we should have kept track of this guy as well). While no Cary Grant, we’d want to meet up later.

When we had a spot to fill on the Robot Co-op roster we posted the ad nationwide. We talked to a few folks and then it dawned on us – what about that guy who sent us that list almost 5 years ago. We sent him an email (that’s sort of like the magic mail box at Keanu’s Lake House). The guy we’d been waiting for, up there on the Empire States Building, had been using the site all along: user # 63 – member since December 12, 2004! Now that is old school! And when he got his email, he was like that guy who rediscovered his lost message in a bottle from years ago. Or something.

Did you know it is 101 degrees in Seattle today? I think it is affecting my metaphors. OKay – on with the announcement.

Ladies & Gentlemen: meet Joe Goldberg, the newest robot at the Robot Co-op.

Joe knows our site about as well as anyone outside of the company. In his first week he’s made all kinds of good suggestions. We feel lucky to have him. Joe will be working closely with Michelle on all things “front end” as well as helping to create new features and improve the performance of the old ones. He’s also diving into our metrics, fighting spam, and making the sites more awesome.

Thanks for joining us Joe! And sorry for the languid, sweaty, over-wrought, allusion filled, intro post! But it is REALLY HOT!

In our ongoing quest to get swift and svelte, we are giving something up we really enjoy (and want to have back). Sort of like when I gave up drinking beer to lose 15 lbs (but picked it back up -more moderately – after I met my goal). Here we are talking about giving up those “related goal” links at the bottom of the page that tell you about related goals (take a look at the image if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

Those little darlings were slowing down some of our most popular pages by as much as 12.5 seconds. So we are setting them aside to speed up these pages and we’ll bring them back when the back-end has been reworked to speed up that query. Thanks for the support on our diet! More to come.

It has been 5 years since The Robot Co-op got its start, and like some of us who work here, we have to admit we’ve gotten a bit out of shape over those years. We were trim and fit back when we first asked “What do you want to do with your life?” but we have put on a few extra pounds. It is a bit overdue that we consider going on a feature diet.

The goal of this diet is a sleeker and swifter Robot Co-op, with faster and more responsive web sites. And the extra calories we need to cut are site features (and whole sites) that are weighing us down. The team has trimmed down and we’ve cut out an “empty calorie” here and there but it’s time to get more radical in our efforts to make the sites fast and stable.

What should we give up on our new diet? Well the first thought we had was “Should do this”.

It was a great idea: a suggestion box for the internet. But it didn’t proceed as we had planned, and ultimately we realized it had an ethical conundrum at the heart of its business model. Is it fair to host a suggestion forum for a company that didn’t ask to participate? It’s an interesting debate. One we never had to really consider because traffic to the site was never very meaningful. So why kill it? Saying goodbye frees up space in our brains. We have one less site to think about and more attention to put toward sites that people care about. We learned a lot from should do this, and don’t regret taking it on. But given what we learned, we decided to take it down last week. Whew, I’m feeling a bit more trim just typing that!

Next we thought, what feature did we build that users just never use? Maybe even a feature a lot of users actually hate! Well no feature was added to 43 Things that ever met with more hate and loathing than our one time pride and joy: SuperCheers.

We had big hopes. If someone would buy a teddy bear for a facebook friend, why not a SuperCheer to encourage a fellow 43Thingster? Well you all told us why, in about 400 angry emails denouncing SuperCheers and the wicked minds that concocted such a feature. OK good riddance.

In removing the feature we give up some revenue that supports the site but we get less hassle for not having to deal with it. We don’t have to maintain a secure server or deal with our credit card processor anymore and it simplifies things. We know about 3 of you out there actually like this feature and will miss it, and we appreciate you supporting the site. Sorry it is going away, but your sacrifice will help us slim down. The feature should be down later tonight.

You probably know it is hard to lose weight, so we could use your support. The goal is a site that is faster and more responsive, and Robots with more attention available toward what matters most. If you have suggestions for cuts you think we ought to make, let us know. We’ll give you an update next week on what else we are doing to get fit (sit ups, new servers, etc). See you at the gym.

If you’ve been following the Robots for any amount of time, then surely you’ve met Daniel somewhere along the way. He was present at the creation, when the idea for 43 Things first emerged and he’s been our “Smooth Operating Officer” for nearly 5 years now.

If you are a real Daniel devotee you might also know that he’s a professional musician who over almost 10 years has released 5 albums with his band Maktub and toured the country a couple times over.

Well today is an auspicious day in that band’s history as they announce the release of their fifth album FIVE. They’ve made FIVE available as a free download, a CD you can buy from their own store, from Amazon or download mp3s from Amazon. iTunes will have it up shortly.

You should definitely check out the free downloads (really pay what you like downloads) and hear what Daniel’s been up to. Here at the Robot Co-op, we couldn’t be more proud of Daniel’s progress on his musical goals. But we are even happier about the personal news Daniel shared with us this week.

Daniel Spils is getting married!

And who is his bride? None other than Brangien Davis, the blogger behind the Robot Co-op’s now defunct Petri Project. The Co-op brought them together and we couldn’t be more proud. We think Daniel couldn’t have found a more witty, urbane, and beautiful woman to spend his life with. And Brangien couldn’t have found a more caring, loyal, and fun loving character with whom to spend each day. The both are two lucky souls and we hope you’ll join us in wishing them the best.

Teary eyed yet? Get ready to turn on the water works: Daniel Spils is taking all this change and taking leave of the Robot Co-op. He’s taking his five year anniversary with 43 Things as an opportunity to spend more time with Brangien, more time with music, more time camping, and more time to recharge for whatever comes next. We can’t say good bye to Daniel, because we count on him being around and cheering on the Co-op, but we have to let him go.

So what can we say Dan? We love you. It has been a blast. You made it up and you made it happen. You got us started and you’ll always be a Robot. Best wishes and we’ll see you at the wedding!