43 steps to the world

I’ve been a fan of the robot coop and their 43 sites for a while. They’re ex amazon personalization folks who are using rails for their development. For a while it seemed cool, 43things was fun to surf, 43ideas was a nifty way for users to provide them new ideas for features. They discovered users were defining places as things and created 43places where you can talk about travel and share where you’ve been and want to go.

It’s fun to surf around, but the practical uses of the 43 sites have escaped me until now. With the addition of 43people it lists relationships. This person wants to do x things you have done, has done y things you want to do, has been to z places want to go to, etc… It really feels like a second step in to social networking sites. In someways it reminds me of O’Reilly Connections which has a faceted tagging system for defining relationships, mostly around finding and getting work.

I keep wishing the robot coop added automated integration with something like wiki travel so each location has more depth, also to encourage users to give back to the travel wiki. Really reaching out in to the web as a opposed to creating a central site to collect everything. The story metaphor is good, but it creates a forum style environment. There is really a space to encourage creation of new content which has depth and can be collaboratively edited.