43 Things Profiling

I’ve been playing around with 43 Things a bit in the last few days and I realized something fun/weird. But first a little note, there’s been some hubbub about them having Amazon as investors, various people have defended them but what I find interesting is that not that long ago Amazon was everyone’s darling, the one dotcom that people loved and who actually delivered on their promise. In that whole thing they’re suddenly big brother. Weird.

Now, back to the initial subject. 43 Things is a little web app that lets you list goals for yourself, take them on with others, comment in various places, etc. A fun, well executed, idea although I find the interface a bit cluttered sometimes and too 37 Signalsish which is bizarre to list as a defect since I looove their stuff and I know they collaborated with the other numbered folk but it’s not distinctive enough in my opinion.

So, when looking at your lists of items you can see who else has that listed and when looking at an item specifically you also see “People doing this are also doing these things”. That’s the fun/weird part I found. It can really throw in your face the stereotypes you follow. For example:

I list Learn Ruby, other people with that goal also want to:

• write an application on Rails (yup)
• Start using SVN.

• get an apple powerbook (yup)

  Sounds familiar. Those who, like me, want to stop procrastinating also want to:

• Take more pictures (yup)
• be happy

• Read more books (yup)

  Those who want to witness the end of IE (I created that one, by the way, look at the bottom of the right column :) ) also aim to:

• master CSS (been there, done that ;) )
• Master PHP (yup, although not a priority)

• Learn Ruby (yup)

  Now that’s certainly close to my geeky self. Those who want to Take more pictures also:

• get an apple powerbook (yup)
• stop procrastinating (yup)

• Be a better blogger (yup)

  Woah. It’s like they’re reading my mind! Which, in a way, they are I guess. I don’t know if it’s started already or if they have plans for it but this has a lot of social soft/ meeting people potential. I’m sure some kind of “search for people with the most common goals” feature would make a killing.