Entertaining 43Things.com
Feb. 10th, 2005 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsSo, someone asked me what my beef is with 43 Things. I originally suspected that the site was a rip-off of 43 Folders, a website much beloved of the geek community, which needs as many tools as it can to get things done. I was challenged about their registry dates. 43Things' registry was created on Apr 6, 2004, but 43Folders was created on August 27, 2004. But then I dig deeper and discover that 43Folders was actually created in June, 2003, but changed registries, so the dates aren't necessarily accurate.
Aside from the question of "from what orifice did 43 Things pull that peculiar random number?" there is the "Who's paying for 43 Things?" question. The CEO has been amazingly evasive about who the money players are. When pressed on how much Amazon has invested in 43 Things, the CEO said, "Nobody's supposed to know that yet." Amazon, on the other hand, admits, "We're Robot Co-Op's only investor." (Drew Herdener, Amazon PR Manager for Technology)
But aside from the niggling questions about riffing on other people's work or whether or not 43Things is collecting individuals' aspirations and feeding them to the web's biggest retailer, there is, for me, the big question: how effective is 43 Things at what it purports to be?
The answer is: not very. 43 Things has no soul.
If you look at the websites that geeks love, that we get impassioned about, that make a difference in the way we live and work, you'll see websites with soul. Someone-- perhaps more than one someone, but someone puts a face and imprints personality on the site that inspires other people. Merlin at 43 Folders, the staff at Livejournal, the crew at Google Labs, the guys at Slashdot, all care. Sure, the Slashdot crew has off-days, but they seem to give a damn about the people they're serving. They sit at the intersection of the subjects they love and the people who love those subjects with them; they thrive in that intersection. Del.icio.us only seems faceless but it, too, has that instant quality of putting you in a place where you feel surrounded with the wisdom of the crowd.
43 Things is missing something that cannot be bought anyway: personality. Soul. Je ne sais quoi. It doesn't know what it wants to be, and what it ends up being is a place where people can brag about what they've accomplished to complete strangers, and that's it.
It doesn't help you organize your life to make that accomplishment happen, point you to resources that can guide you, allow you to access chats, critiques, or foundries where your efforts can receive helpful insight, or engage those whose lives you would touch with your work. All it can do is give you a chest-thumping broadsheet for each milestone, along with a list of recommended purchases that might help you in reaching the next. It is not a community tool.
What it does do, it doesn't provide easy tools with which to do it. As impassioned as a bunch of "geeks with their powerbooks" may be, the website comes off as polished as a Britney Spears in Las Vegas concert, and about as deep.
Aside from the question of "from what orifice did 43 Things pull that peculiar random number?" there is the "Who's paying for 43 Things?" question. The CEO has been amazingly evasive about who the money players are. When pressed on how much Amazon has invested in 43 Things, the CEO said, "Nobody's supposed to know that yet." Amazon, on the other hand, admits, "We're Robot Co-Op's only investor." (Drew Herdener, Amazon PR Manager for Technology)
But aside from the niggling questions about riffing on other people's work or whether or not 43Things is collecting individuals' aspirations and feeding them to the web's biggest retailer, there is, for me, the big question: how effective is 43 Things at what it purports to be?
The answer is: not very. 43 Things has no soul.
If you look at the websites that geeks love, that we get impassioned about, that make a difference in the way we live and work, you'll see websites with soul. Someone-- perhaps more than one someone, but someone puts a face and imprints personality on the site that inspires other people. Merlin at 43 Folders, the staff at Livejournal, the crew at Google Labs, the guys at Slashdot, all care. Sure, the Slashdot crew has off-days, but they seem to give a damn about the people they're serving. They sit at the intersection of the subjects they love and the people who love those subjects with them; they thrive in that intersection. Del.icio.us only seems faceless but it, too, has that instant quality of putting you in a place where you feel surrounded with the wisdom of the crowd.
43 Things is missing something that cannot be bought anyway: personality. Soul. Je ne sais quoi. It doesn't know what it wants to be, and what it ends up being is a place where people can brag about what they've accomplished to complete strangers, and that's it.
It doesn't help you organize your life to make that accomplishment happen, point you to resources that can guide you, allow you to access chats, critiques, or foundries where your efforts can receive helpful insight, or engage those whose lives you would touch with your work. All it can do is give you a chest-thumping broadsheet for each milestone, along with a list of recommended purchases that might help you in reaching the next. It is not a community tool.
What it does do, it doesn't provide easy tools with which to do it. As impassioned as a bunch of "geeks with their powerbooks" may be, the website comes off as polished as a Britney Spears in Las Vegas concert, and about as deep.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Hey there...
Date: 2005-02-11 12:27 am (UTC)