December 31, 2004
We’ve been quietly inviting 43 people a day to 43 Things for the last couple weeks, and I’m happy to say that we are able to launch the site a day before we had originally planned. It’s probably a good idea not to flip the switch while nursing a big hangover anyway. Take a look!
Start the new year by finding your 43 things:
http://43things.com
Here are the in-progress lists of us robots at the co-op: Josh, Daniel, Bob, Todd, Ivan, Eric, and myself.
Also, anyone that had a list on Twinkler can move it on over to the new site by going here. Enjoy!
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Posted by Buster
December 13, 2004
Woohoo! We just sent out invitations to the first 43 people who signed up to try out the new site. These are the first 43 people that we potentially don’t know, so I’m very exciting to get a bit of feedback from the new folks.
More will be added every day until we launch… so if you haven’t gotten your invitation yet, it should be coming soon.
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Posted by Buster
December 8, 2004
Want to know what ~200,000 people say they want to do with their life?
I said earlier that I’d be happy opening up some of the data if people were interested in playing around with it. I got a few interested replies and since then I’ve been scratching my head about what exactly to give out. Too much data is overwhelming, not enough is restricting. So, I’m just doing the simplest thing and leaving it open for you to tell me what you want.
Double Pipe-delimited file (in the format of):
rank||# of people who have the goal||unique ID||name
http://robotcoop.com/data/twinkler_goals-12-08-2004.txt (572K)
With the unique ID, you can construct a URL to that thing’s page like this:
http://twinkler.43things.com/twinkler/thing/[ID]
Let me (erik at this domain) know if you do anything interesting with this. Also, if there’s different information that you think we have and which you want to do something fun with, let me know and I’ll try my best to give it to you.
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Posted by Buster
December 8, 2004
We haven’t quite opened the floodgates on the Hugster beta yet. However, we’re still accepting people to sign up to be notified when we do. Anyone that has signed up is already first in line, of course. Looks like this will start happening for real early next week.
Many teams I’ve worked on in the past end up slipping their dates because they want to get that one last feature in … it’s quite the opposite over here. We’re busy taking features away, trying to whittle the site down to its essense.
43 Things/ Twinkler is teaching us a lot about the power of simplicity (not that we weren’t already eager students at this school). Strangely, our first prototype (Snuzzle) was the most feature-packed and the most lines of code. Twinkler is only 450 lines of code. Hugster will be one half the Snuzzle site as far as functionality is concerned (I’ll go into a list of features that have been temporarily pulled a bit later). I almost need three hands in order to count the number of fully-implemented features we’ve cut. It’s a joyous feeling. My only hope is that it’ll be 1/4th the site it once was by the time you see it … and that that 1/4th is the best 1/4th we can give you.
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Posted by Buster
December 4, 2004
OK, technically speaking, Hugster isn’t a pony, like Twinkler or Snuzzle. Hugster is a Bushwoolie, the strange furry companions of My Little Ponies.
They appeared in My Little Pony: The Movie and in various television specials. In Year 5, they became figurines, sold with the Princess Ponies. You can read more about them if you are so inclined.
But as far as the Robot Co-op is concerned, Snuzzle was our prototype for 43 Things, Twinkler our teaser, and Hugster is the release candidate which we’ll launch as 43 Things. So far, we been inviting 3 or 4 people each day to try out Hugster and give us some feedback. This coming week, we want to ramp that up to 43 people a day. So we need you to sign up to test it out!
We’ll also be revealing a bit more over the next few weeks about what it is we are hoping to do and showing some screenshots to share with you. Here’s the first – it is a the sign-on screen to the Beta – and we’ll even link to it today. If you’ve been invited into Hugster, you’ll see this page when you respond to the invitation. If you haven’t been invited yet, click on the image below, scroll down and enter your email address to be an early adopter. We’ll confirm your email address and add you to the pool of potential invitees.
Thanks for your interest in doing 43 Things.
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Posted by joshp100
December 2, 2004
Walking to lunch at Ballet with my fellow Robots, I was recounting the film Kinsey which I had seen over the weekend. Prior to Dr. Kinsey, no one had taken a truly scientific approach to profiling human sexuality—Kinsey managed to cast a wide survey net with his now infamous human sexual behavior studies.
As fate would play out Seattle’s own love doctor, Dan Savage, was dining at the table north of the Robots as the conversation turned to 43 Things and Twinkler. We let Dan eat his pho in peace, but couldn’t help but draw the correlation of events: Kinsey’s landmark sex studies, Dan Savage’s hilarious sex column and the fact that in its first two weeks 43 Things had experienced a 9% goal adoption rate for the sexy and downright mature.
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Posted by Daniel Spils
