The Robot Co-op

I’m happy to announce that the Robot Co-op has decided to take over maintenance and further development of All Consuming. Yay! In case it’s not obvious, this is a very good thing!

In case you’ve never heard of this site before, it’s basically a site that helps you keep track of what you’re reading, listening to, watching, and (our new favorite media) eating. Check out how Josh and Bob have tagged their steak frites from the Elysian! If you have a 43 Things account already, you can log in from here and begin building the list of things that you’re consuming.

The main thing that this means to existing All Consuming users is that we are moving the site over to more stable servers, and integrating the accounts and infrastructure into 43 Things. The new version of the site is 43.allconsuming.net, and we’re going to ask that people open up a 43 Things account (if they don’t already have one) and import their existing All Consuming account into it if they want to continue using the new version of the site. The two versions of the site will exist alongside each other for 90 days, at which point we’ll be moving 43.allconsuming.net version over to www.allconsuming.net. If anyone doesn’t want to move your list over, they don’t need to do anything at all.

I bet people have questions! Learn more here →

I’m very excited that we’ll be able to actually continue working on this—as part of my job no less! If you have feedback or questions, you can email me (erikbenson at gmail dot com) or all of us at the Robot Co-op (robotcoop at gmail dot com).

Today’s release brings a lot of new features that people have been requesting and talking about for a long time:

Subscribe to People (aka Friends, Bookmarks, Contacts, etc)

If you’re logged in, every person’s profile page now has a “Subscribe to this person’s recent activity” link in the right sidebar, and this link (when clicked) will let you keep track of all of their entries, comments, and goal adoption/completion milestones from the site itself or via RSS or even via the web services. Previously, the only way to keep track of your friends was to invite them all to a team or individually subscribe to each of their RSS feeds. After you have a few subscriptions, check out the Recent Activity page (linked from your profile page and the Zeitgeist page) and you’ll see all of their activity aggregated into one big happy list.

At the moment subscriptions are private, meaning that only you can see who you’re subscribed to (though you can see how many people are subscribed to you), but we’re curious to hear any thoughts on this… do people care if this information is public or private? Play around with it for a while and let us know what you think.

43 Things Suggests

Along the lines of Google Suggests, this feature lets you start typing into the “add a goal” box on our homepage and it’ll show you a dropdown of all the goals that begin with those letters/words, sorted by popularity.

We’ve been having tons of fun the last few days seeing all of the goals that start with “travel to”, “be a better”, “build”, “meet a”, “meet b”, “meet c”, etc… and some of the more disturbing ones like “eat a”. With almost 90,000 goals, it’s difficult to find a verb that someone doesn’t want to enact… it’s really quite crazy if you think about it.

Multiple Profile Images

Before today, you could only have one picture of yourself to represent all of the multifaceted corners of your personality. We’ve upped that to 10 now, and have created a gallery page that displays them all, with optional captions.

Invite people to a goal by their username

We haven’t really publicized this on the site yet, but you can now invite people to do something with you as a team even if you don’t know their email address. More info on this on the ideas site.

Bubbles!

And with this I think we can say that our latest release code-named Bubbles is officially complete. Momentum is building here at the Co-op… there are two or three other exciting projects that are on their way, which we’ll be announcing here soon enough.