Odeo rides out on rails today, cruising into TED, and debuting on the NYT tech page. Wow! What a start. Congrats to Ev, Rabble, and the rest of the team.
Congrats to DHH as well – there are 223 more people that want to build an application on rails, lots of amazing stuff to come.
As someone with the goal of being fluent in Italian, the coolest thing that happened to 43 Things this week was this great article in La Repubblica:
After launching a couple new features last week and being chosen as one of Kim’s Kool Sites (which has a surprising number of subscribers), we shot past 10,000 registered users this weekend on 43 Things, and actually just passed 11,000 as well.
There’s some heated debate at the co-op about who exactly the 11,000th person was. I personally think it was cheesebikini and don’t have to go into the many reasons why I think this, but others who claim to have “ess queue elle” on their side say it was ebyrnes. Well, we love all of our users equally, regardless of what their outfits are made out of, so I guess it’s not worth fighting over too much.
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Posted by Buster
We have been experiencing a couple outages yesterday and today due to a problem with our load balancer. We rely on our host to handle the load balancer issues and are thinking that it might be a good idea to get our own pretty soon (or at least, find a solution that allows us to have a bit more control over our own fate). In any case, we’re very sorry that the site hasn’t been up as much as we’d like it to be. I’ll keep updates here as things progress.
Updates:
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Posted by Buster
Hello Quackers! The latest version of 43 Things is now live.
Cheer This Goal!
Cheers allows you to support people and their goals by cheering them on. Click the “Cheer this goal” link next to goal on the profile pages of people you admire. We only give you a handful of cheers a day, so spend them wisely.
Cities
Cities adds a new regional dimension to the site. You can now see popular goals by city. At launch these are the top 3 goals in a sampling of cities:
Find your city here and add it to your account to start influencing your city’s list.
I Want To Help Others Do This!
Select the “help others” option when completing a goal and you’ll become a resource for those in need. Stuck on the progress of a goal or just looking for a little advice? You can now submit a plea for help that gets sent directly to the people who are interested in helping.
A few of the smaller new features include…
Not to mention 73 other little bug fixes and performance tweaks…
As always, we love hearing your comments, suggestions and bug reports. Drop us a line.
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Posted by Daniel Spils
Want to Learn Ruby? 98% of people that have completed this goal think it’s worth doing. More importantly, lots of them are willing to help.
When Quackers releases, if you have the goal to Learn Ruby you will be able to post a “plea for help” – basically ask a question of folks who’ve “done this” and get answers back from the community of people who have met this goal.
The stats help you see which goals people think are worth doing and which are not. Some examples?
We are polishing up the last bits – it should be online by the end of the week.
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Posted by Daniel Spils
First there was Snuzzle, then Hugster. In the short but proud history of using My Little Pony names for 43 Things releases, next week we’ll be releasing Quackers … the next version of 43 Things.
What can you expect from Quackers? Here’s a preview of things to come:
Cities
Currently on 43 Things 16 people want to Attend a Building of Basecamp Seminar in London. But wouldn’t it be even cooler to see what 43 Things users in London are up to? What are the most popular goals in your city? Does anyone else in Pittsburgh want to ride in a hot air ballon? Quackers will answer these questions.
Plea for Help
You may have noticed the “Would you be willing to help others do this?” checkbox on your final entry after completing a goal. Quackers will leverage the community of people who’ve completed a goal and are willing to help the rest of us who are trying to complete the same goal. Want to quit smoking? Soon you’ll be able to ask these people for advice.
Enhancements and Improvements
As always, you’ve provided us with great feedback and all sorts of feature ideas. We’ll be rolling out a few more enhancements and improvements such as:
…and of course one or two surprises.
Quackers will launch next week and we’ll be excited to hear what you think.
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Posted by Daniel Spils
Some folks have asked for more details on the sequence of events to our funding. Here’s a bit more of the story as to how 43 Things came into the world.
If the beginning is when you sit down with friends and decide to start a company, Amazon wasn’t there at the beginning. We started the company in Daniel’s basement with a list of crazy ideas we’d been kicking around for months. We started building the prototype using instiki – not even writing code – and then enlisted the help of DHH to start thinking about developing the site using Ruby on Rails. We roped in our friends at 37 Signals to help. And we started recruiting more of our friends to work at the co-op. Along the way, friends at Amazon heard me out on some of my ideas, but all was very casual at this point.
As we congealed around what we were building and how it might come together, I started conversations with various people in a position to help. I spoke with folks at Amazon (I worked there from 1996-2001, and Microsoft from 2002-2004) as well as several other angel investors and VC firms. We decided to self fund until we worked out a deal with Amazon.com. That came together in the Fall of 2004. We were working toward a public announcement on the investment next month, but the story came out ahead of the announcement.
We are committed to what we call The age of the amateur and if that means we are going to make missteps as we build the company, so be it.
We don’t see Amazon’s investment as defining what we are doing. It just helps us do it. We are focused on building 43 Things, and other products that create networks of shared experiences to borrow John Udell’s phrase. Some would like more detail on terms, and others want to craft conspiracy theories about how this came together. We don’t really have a shared interest in either topic.
So thanks for the congratulations and support. I hope you’ll try out 43 Things and send us some feedback on the product. We’re listening to your suggestions and evolving the site to make it more fun and useful.
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Posted by joshp100
Amazon.com has invested in The Robot Co-op. We think it will get easier to meet our goal to Start a company that survives longer than 2 years though we still have lots of work to do. We are excited that we will have a chance to build products that are innovative and change the way people share information and connect online.
Nothing changes about how we run The Robot Co-op or 43 Things. You can check out the FAQ, the Terms of Use or the Privacy Policy if you have questions about any of those items.
To all the folks who’ve tried out 43 things, reported bugs and thought about how we might change the world, thanks for getting us this far!
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Posted by joshp100
The Robot Co-op is opening its doors to a Designer available for immediate contract design work. We’re intent on hiring the right Designer as a full-time Robot—contract work is a great way to see if we love working together. Our products are built around human aspirations and what we refer to as networks of shared experience. Our office is low frills; high thrills.
You should be passionate about:
We’re looking for someone who:
A bit about us:
Ideally you’ll be located in Seattle, but we realize the right designer may live someplace else. Please send a URL to your current work along with your resume to [email protected].
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Posted by Daniel Spils
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