BACKGROUND:
Less than a year old, 43 Things opened for business on January 1, 2005. On August 19, 2005; they registered their 10,000th user. As of November 25, the site had 141,274 registered users from at least 3,706 cities (from home page). Part of this growth is due to recent press. Growth could also have occured because 43 Things won the 2005 Webby Award for Social Networking in May, 2005.
ROBOT CO-OP (CREATORS/MANAGERS):
43 Things was founded by former Amazon.com developers who built off their prior experience working with Amazon's recommendation systems. In fact, according to an article in "The Deal.com", 6 out of 7 of the company founders worked on the team that developed Amazon's recommendation and personalization engines. These seven guys named their company The Robot Co-op. They also created 43 Places and 43 People, which run parallel to and are partially integrated with 43 Things. 43 Places allows users to list 43 places they want to visit and 43 they have visited, while 43 People allows users to create a list of 43 people they want to meet and 43 they have met.
PARTNERSHIPS & FUNDING:
Another site the Robot Co-op folks run is All Consuming. While part of the "43 Places family", it is not yet integrated into the main site. Here users can list what they are reading, listening to, or viewing. When I searched for a book, it checked Amazon's database to find what I was looking for. This new site hints at one reason why 43 Things is funded by Amazon.com. One other possible reason is data collection. In their privacy policy, 43 Things clearly states that they reserve the right to share all the data they collect about users. To find out more about the arrangement between 43 Things and Amazon, you can read this article from "The Deal.com"
To learn about a 3 day, but relatively unfounded, controversy over Amazon's funding of 43 Things, see this article in Wikipedia. A reporter for Slate believed that Amazon's funding was sneaky and underhanded, when in fact the partnership had long been made public on the Robot Co-op Blog and the blogs of the individual developers. A controversy was thus largely avoided because of the nearly complete transparency of company decisions afforded by the companies blog and those of its employees. In fact, the companies only corporate site is its blog. This is an excellent example of a company using blogs for transparency as is recommended by Dan Gilmour in We The Media (2004). Interestingly, the Wikipedia article explains that this pseudo-controversy caused a 35% spike in users over those 3 days!43 Things also hosts Google's targeted text-based advertisements. Ideally, advertisments will be relevant to users listed goals.
Also, according to the article in "The Deal.com", CEO of Robot Co-op, Joshua Peterson, views Craigslist as a model to emulate. Furthermore, Robot Co-op plans to keep 43 Places free for now.
In the next section, we will examine the usability of 43 Things.
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