A perfect 43!

It's been a busy few days at the Robot Co-op. We pushed out our teaser site, and the response has been pretty interesting. It's exciting to be taking steps toward releasing 43things, and we are learning more each day. First lesson? People are nasty! We knew we'd get filth on the site but it came faster than we would have guessed. Oh well, that is a quality problem. Who bothers putting smutty comments on sites no one reads?

Back in the day, one of the pre-cursors to 43 Things was an idea for an immersive, multiplayer game that cuts across the online and offline division of space/time. Sort of a flickr scavenger hunt or Jeopardy meets Meetup. So I'm going to keep looking for games to play with 43 Things. Here's my first attempt: Make a list of 43 goals that have no more than 1 person doing them. If you do it, you get a perfect 43! Here's my list that scored a perfect 43.

Now we'll see how long it takes to get someone to adopt one of these new goals. Just because it is not a game doesn't mean you can't play it like one.

Comments

[Joe Goldberg]

"an immersive, multiplayer game that cuts across the online and offline division of space/time"

Sounds like "I Love Bees":
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65365,00.html

[Ryan]

Does this mean that every user might get a 43ThingsScore?

[Abe]

How about collaboratively filtering everyone's 43 things?

In other words, the site would take your list of 43 things, compare it to every one else's list, and show you a list of the users who most closely match your list, ranked by how similarity. It would be great, if those users all had profiles where they could describe themselves. Then, you could browse through profiles to find the kinds of people who want the same things out of life that you do.

You could refine the process, by letting users sugget other questions than just 'What do you want to do with your life?" like:

- What do you want to do with your life, in the next 5 years?
- What do you want to do with your professional life, before you retire?
- Where do you want to travel?
- And so on.

If users pick the questions and answers that they value, while the site collaboratively filters them, then like-minded users (meaning, users who picked similar questions with similar answers) will easily find each other, and voila! A tool to let people find others who share their values. It would allow inidividual users to self-organize into large self-defined demographics, based on values, rather than gender, age, income, etc. It woul be a launch.com or last.fm that brings people together based on shared values, rather than shared musical tastes.

Users who use the site to find others who share their values will have to use trial and error to find the types of questions/answers that lead them to the types of people that they feel most share their values. So, by allowing the user to find others who share his/her values, the site incents the user to narrow down the questions/answers that are most important in himself/herself, while not being so narrow as to not overlap with any other users.

Also, you could increase the granularity of the collaborative filtering, by allowing users to rank items by importance, within their particular lists. For example, if the question is "What do you want to do with your life?" you might rank "to be happy" as "Very Important", whereas "to be rich" might be only "not important". Then, when your list is compared with others, those with similar rankings are matched more closely to you than others.

[erika]

It doesn't seem like there's really a draw to match people -- there's already sites like okcupid or tribe that do this pretty well already. about the game playing idea --
maybe make a way of calling someone's bluff that they'd actually do something..

or a way to find tricks/shortcuts/hacks to completing a goal... allow people to create subgoals perhaps?

[Josh Petersen]

Hmm. What do you like best at tribe and ok cupid for matching people?

I like the dare idea! We have some thoughts on "subgoals" too. But it is pretty early to add features - first we need to learn more about how people want to use the site. Twinkler was just an experiment, hugster is the release candidate.

[Eric Eggertson]

Josh:

There's bound to be a bunch of people who are seriously following some goals, and want to talk about their aspirations, tips on how to get there, WHY they want to achieve these things, what surprises they encounter along the way, etc. There are also going to be people who log in, click off a bunch of items, maybe post a few comments, and don't pay much attention to it.

You may want to have a filter that moves people who don't seem very involved to show up further down the list (I bet you already have that built-in, or planned).

The trick, if you want to put a competitive or fun angle into it, is to avoid something that rewards quantity. I've seen web sites that reward volumes of postings, and it just encourages people to make a whole bunch of useless postings.

One idea: some way of people "tipping" (ie. giving them some form of recognition or whatever) people who have helped them towards achieving their goal, or realizing that their goal isn't worth pursuing.... This would allow a certain amount of community give and take. But I'd beware anything that offered a tangible benefit, or you'll get people trading "tips" in order to boost their profile/rating/whatever.