This is a post about two of our lesser-known websites, 43 Places and Lists of Bests.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve begun work on a big revamp of 43 Places.  One of our first orders of business is improving the way users can create lists of places.  To simplify the list-making process across all our websites, we’re going to move all the Lists of Bests place lists into 43 Places.

No need to worry about missing lists, lost data, or broken links, as nothing will be removed in the process.  You’ll still be able to track your progress as you step foot onto each of the 7 continents, and keep checking off items on the 50 places to see before you die.

As always, please let us know if you have suggestions on how we can improve our sites, even if the suggestions aren’t related to hyphenation.

Or you can go directly to your 2010 Resolutions if you know your username, e.g. http://www.43things.com/people/resolutions/joe

From that page, you can copy individual Resolutions over to your Life List with the click of a button!

While we were at it, we did an update to the homepage, which should make it easier to add new goals and create a new account.  New users can play around with the site, adopting goals which are temporarily saved until they create a 43 Things account.  We also cleaned up the log in and sign up pages.

Check it out: http://www.43things.com

As always, please let us know if you see bugs, slownesses, or any other ghosts in the machine.

Thanks, from the Robots

1. Work more and better
2. Work by a schedule
3. Wash teeth if any
4. Shave
5. Take bath
6. Eat good – fruit – vegetables – milk
7. Drink very scant if any
8. Write a song a day
9. Wear clean clothes – look good
10. Shine shoes

He made 33 resolutions in all, you can read the rest here.  We’d like to think that Woody would be an active user of 43 Things, were he alive today.

[via Scott Berkun]

How’s your 2010 going so far?  We hope you’re sticking to your New Years Resolutions!

Sunday morning starting at 2:00am Pacific time, we’re bringing all the sites down for database maintenance.  The outage may last up to 4 hours, but probably won’t take that long.  We’re sorry for the inconvenience, and we hope we picked a time that will impact as few people as possible.

update: maintenance completed without any problems.  The sites were down for about 2.5 hours.  Thanks for your patience (especially those further East from us who had to go without 43 Things in the middle of their days!)

[Photo by andrewscott]

Thanks for the cards, and we hope you’re finding success in the New Year so far!

It’s your 43 Things Year In Review.  All the gory details in list format are also available.  There’s a link to it on the right side of your profile page, like so:

When I looked at my Year In Review I noticed that I write entries and give cheers in fits and spurts.  I also found a few goals from the beginning of the year that I totally forgot about.  Is there anything interesting, surprising, or totally expected in yours?

Download it for free from the iTunes Store using this link, or search for “43 things” (PS. we had to release a new app rather than do an upgrade of our existing app, so users who already have our app will have to install it again instead of upgrading).  We hope you like it!

“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.

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?”

The Tab is back!

In our ongoing efforts to lose a few pounds . . .

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.