43 Things

» see 43things.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

43 things was the kind of thing seattle web 2.0 produced when amazon spilled engineers into small studios that wanted to build something nicer than amazon. erik benson and daniel spils built it inside the robot co-op with josh petersen, an ex-amazon executive who joined as the third co-founder. they launched 1 january 2005. the idea fit on a postcard. write down up to forty-three things you want to do in your life. let the site tag them and connect you to other people writing the same goals down.

the number forty-three came from a george miller cognitive psychology line about how many items a person can meaningfully hold in working memory. the site bet that this was the upper bound of an honest life list. it won a webby in 2005 for best social networking service back when the category was still being figured out.

i missed this one. by january 2005 i was a turkish university student on ttnet broadband, mostly inside msn and the early friendster wave that had not yet flipped into facebook. the goal-list community was a seattle-and-bay-area shape of social network. the cultural overlap with what worked in turkey at the time was thin.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

each goal had its own page. "learn to play guitar" was the same page for everyone who wrote it. you could mark progress, write little entries about how it was going, and read what fifty thousand other people were saying about the same goal. it was somewhere between a journal and a low-tone self-help forum.

sister sites stacked on top: 43 places for "places i want to visit" and all things i've done as the inverse list. a small empire of life-list verbs under the same co-op.

~ the day it died ~

the robot co-op put the site into read-only mode on 15 august 2014 with an announcement that the social-bookmarking model around it had not aged well. facebook had quietly absorbed every "list the things you want to do" instinct into status updates, and twitter had absorbed the small-talk version. there was no business reason to keep paying for the servers.

on 1 january 2015, exactly ten years after launch, the domain went dark. archive.org has the lists. the people who wrote them are mostly still alive, and a fraction of them have probably done the things.

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