The Robot Co-op

What’s new? You might have noticed a few new features on 43places lately. Here’s a quick run down of some of the new stuff we’ve been working on.

• Entry Types: We’ve added “entry types” that let you classify the type of story you are telling about a place. We hope these may give you some inspiration as to the sorts of stories you might want to tell. Find the entry types by writing an entry about any of the places on your list. Still want to add your own title; select “A story about this place” and it works the same as it ever did.

• Tag Browsing: We’ve reworked the way tags are working on the site. Now anyone can tag anything, wheteher they’ve been there or not. So if you are in to organizing, help us describe places with tags. You can also get a taste of the new way to browse tags we are developing by going to a city (like Seattle and clicking on one of the tags on the right such as restaurants, bar, or park. From there you can refine with related tags as well as narrow down (or scale up) the geographic area you are interested in.

• Events: We’ve recently added the ability to add an event to a place and also created a way you can tell people in your city what events you are attending. For example, check out all the shows Todd is going to lately (you can see them on the right hand side of profile page). The astute will notice that we’re collaborating with Upcoming.org to import events from their site as well for specific cities. You’ll notice these events because they are linked back to Upcoming under the event name.

• Check-ins: I think we talked about this before, but we’ve also added a feature that lets you “check in” at a place where you are a regular. You can do this from the website, from email, or from your mobile phone. It’s a fun way to track your visits and start to see the places where you are a “regular”. For an example, check out the spots Erik frequents (you can see them right below the map on his profile page).

More to come We have lots more work we are doing on this push to improve 43 Places, but we’d love to hear from you. Have a great idea for what we should be working on? Add your idea to http://ideas.43places.com or send us an email at [email protected].

Thanks!

If you have a Typepad blog, you can now add 14 different widget types from 43 Things, 43 Places, All Consuming, or Lists of Bests. Here’s Typepad’s announcement of the widget feature, and our widget detail page. Try it out and let us know if you’d like to see any other kinds of widgets. They’re quite easy to make.

Today we’re releasing a new and improved Lists of Bests and a redesigned All Consuming. Exciting news as these two sites work so well together. When you mark items off a Lists of Bests list it automatically records your consumption and worth it/not worth it rating over on All Consuming, and vice versa. Two great sites that work great together.

If you already have a 43 account, then you’re good to go. This is part of our one-site-fits-all approach to building an infinitely cascading network of networking sites (or something like that). So, go check ‘em out and let us know what you think.

P.S. The BBC’s 50 Things To Eat Before You Die is strangely popular. Click “add to my lists” and get started.

The new and improved Lists of Bests is moving closer to public release. We are starting to invite everyone that wanted into the beta and folks seem to be enjoying themselves.

For those not familiar with the original Lists of Bests, it was a site for tracking your progress on lists of books, music and movies. We’ve expanded on Bill Turner’s original idea by adding food, people, places, and goals. You can adopt existing lists, create your own (e.g. “My favorite people in France”) and the community gets to maintain definitive lists such as the Academy Awards ‘Best Picture’.

Here’s what beta tester Niklas has to say:

Another thing I’m really keen on, is Lists of Bests, a site recently bought by The Robot Co-op … at first I feared this would turn out to be a catalogue for people with asperger’s syndrome, but no, it’s actually very nice. First, there are a bunch of big lists available already, divided into categories, such as “Movies”, “Books” and “Music”. For movies, you’ve got lists like “The Online Film Critics Society’s ‘Top 100 Overlooked Films of the 1990s’” and “The Criterion Collection”, which you devour by entering them, clicking the check-boxes and note whether or not the film was worth consuming.

Get on in there and let us know what you think!

Yahoo! has been making the news as of late with its acquisitions of all the great Web 2.0 newness. First there was Flickr, then upcoming.org, then del.icio.us, and now… no, not the Robot Co-op. Instead, we decided to pull a switcheroo and acquire something of our own, and we did right under Yahoo!’s nose.

Laboring away in Yahoo’s Dallas office was Erik Benson’s one time SXSW roommate, Bill Turner. Bill had built a great site called “Lists of Bests” and we liked it a lot! So in our bid for Web 2.0 grandeur, we’ve gone on our own acquisition spree, first buying Erik Benson’s All Consuming, and now Bill Turner’s Lists of Bests. You can read Bill’s blog post about all this on his blog.

We think they’ll make beautiful music together (along with our other sites) and we are excited to share new versions of them with you soon.

We are hard at work integrating these new sites in to the 43 Things world and adding some new Robot Co-op signature features. If you are interested in helping test the new sites, or want to be notified when they launch, head over to Lists of Bests and sign up. And congratulations, Bill Turner! Thanks for creating Lists of Bests.

We just launched a nifty homepage feature on All Consuming. I think we’ll call it “What Should I Consume Next?”. Give it a try on the All Consuming homepage. In short, you get to ask the people on the internet what you next should read, listen to, watch, eat or otherwise consume. Click on the little paperboy or “get suggestions on what to consume next” to get started.

We’re actively working on All Consuming all the time so the design is changing in real time—don’t worry if the shirt doesn’t match the pants currently. We should have things design-alicious in the coming weeks.

Okay, hit us up with some feedback!

As the site has grown we’ve learned better ways to do things. The time is at hand to swap our old way of doing subscriptions (on 43 Things and 43 Places) to the new way (on 43 People). Soon we’ll be redirecting http://www.43things.com/zeitgeist/subscriptions to http://www.43people.com/subscriptions

What this ought to mean for the site(s) is better stability and fewer errors (oops pages). It will also mean that all subscription reading will happen on 43 People. It will take us a bit of time to work out the kinks, and oh, on the internet we all love change, but for some people this change probably will take some getting use to. The upside of a faster and more reliable site is likely worth the hassle.

In the new year we have a wicked plan (it’s called 6/6/6 internally) to make the site wicked fast.

You can now send your future self a reminder for any goal on your 43 Things list. Here’s how it works:

• go to the goal page, click “add a reminder” (upper right).
• select when you want to be reminded via a dropdown (in a couple days, next week, next month, in about 6 months, by next year)
• customize the reminder to your future self (or just use the text we provide)

That’s about it. You cancel the reminder by clicking a cancel link when the reminder email shows up in your inbox.

We’re also riffing on All Consuming right now and added I am consuming this and I have consumed this links on the homepages along with some convenient Ajax-tion. Suggestions are always welcome.

“We launched a bunch of new things on All Consuming today,” says Erik. And he’s telling the truth.

It’s nowhere near complete, but we’re chiseling away and hoping today is a step toward a better All Consuming experience. The changes had me adding all sorts of books, movies, music and food & drink to my recent consumption list. Carrick added this organic green tea with ginger. He’s crazy like that.

Consume! Then give us some of your ideas for All Consuming and help us make it up and make it happen.

Tomorrow we begin counting down the 43 days until the new year on the 43T homepage. It’s been a year since we launched Snuzzle, the beta version of 43 Things, and January 1, 2006 will mark the 1 year anniversary of 43 Things going live. The Robots hope you’ve enjoyed 43 Things as much as we have. Here’s a list of new 43T features we’re releasing today—check it out:

• Countdown - 43 days until the new year (actually, you’ll see that tomorrow 11/19/2005)
• Let me fail
• Recently cheered goals on the Zeitgeist
• Photo gallery for 43T goals
• Cheer a comment

Let Me Fail. One of our top 43T user requests. Today you can click the I give up link under the I’ve done this button and explain your reasons for giving up. Ah … the sweet smell of failure.

Recently Cheered. We’re swapping Today’s Popular Goals on the Zeitgeist with Recently Cheered Goals. We think this will be more interesting and “funner” to look at. Let us know what you think.

Photo Gallery. You can now upload photos to your goals in much the same way you upload photos to a place on 43 Places. Currently you can upload one photo for every entry on 43T, but it’s tied to the actual entry. Now you can upload multiple photos to any goal and there will be a shared photo gallery at the top of every goal page. It’s probably easier if you give it a whirl instead of me babbling on. Go upload some goal photos and let’s rock the image server!

Cheer A Comment. Cheering. It’s like a mini scoobie snack minus the calories. Now you can cheer comments.

We’ll be releasing new features come 2006 and we’ve got all sorts of interesting Robot ideas brewing in the coming months. So keep on keeping on, make progress, cheer all that is worthy and eat plenty of fruit. We’ll do the same.

We are briefly taking the site down while we roll out some new features.

Stay tuned - we should be back in a few minutes.

I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow on how a proper appreciation for the genius of Benjamin Franklin could save us from the silly Web 2.0 meme.

Social Hour starts at 6 PM, Presentations at 7 PM, here are the coordinates. If you think this is interesting or amusing and you aren’t busy trying to hug Werner Herzog, come on by and say hello.

Yesterday we passed the 100,000 people mark on 43 Things. Exciting news as it blows our original expectations out of the water. 43 Things has not just grown faster than we imagined but it has grown in interesting and unexpected ways. I never would have guessed that the day we passed 100,000 users the top goal would be customize my myspace page. That’s some crazy jazz!

100,000 people in 3,000 cities doing over 200,000 things and still growing. Not sure where it’s all headed but folks still want to go on a road trip with no predetermined destination and I for one plan to tag along for the ride.

Have we mentioned Gusty?

As you may know, all the releases at the Robot Co-op are named after My Little Ponies. When we work on a new release, we always leave a few great features behind. It’s part of the wisdom we learned from DHH: “Instead of launching a half-assed product, just launch half the product”.

Almost 30 days ago we pushed out 43 Places, and to get it out the door we left behind more than 20 great features. Starting last week and continuing through today, we’ve been adding back some of the features we left behind.

So let me tell you about Gusty! One of our favorite new feature we call “tag browsing”. Looking for a good breakfast place in San Francisco or a seafood place in Seattle? Maybe you are more particular. Perhaps you just want Seattle Japanese seafood. You have entered the realm of multi-faceted tag surfing.

Here’s another: have you wondered about what some of the places you love look like from outerspace? Here’s the Piazza San Marco in Venezia, Il Colosseo (The Coloseum) in Roma, and the Washington Monument in Washington, DC. Want to help put more places on the map? Scroll down to the bottom of any page and click the “Help locate this place” link. I’m glad we’ve got that Google Dev team working for us.

Here’s a shot of the task cards we’ve been working on over the last few weeks. We’ll fill you in on a few more of the new features over the next few days.