By Rudolf Ammann · August 04, 2005
43 Things is a social networking site that went live on December 31, 2004. Its little sister, 43 Places, debuted on June 27, 2005.
Both sites are reminiscent of Flickr and make use of tagging to establish connections between subscribers.
Both sites have an educational focus in that they encourage subscribers to develop new skills or acquire knowledge. While 43 Things invites its subscribers to make a list of goals they want to attain, 43 Places invites them to list places they want to visit. On both sites subscribers can share their thoughts with anyone who intends to do the same thing or visit the same place, and with anyone who is doing it or has already done it.
Jeremy Hiebert has a plausible account of how one site evolved from the other:
I think the reason is that the scope of 43 Things is so enormous—goals can be anything, in any domain. It’s great to learn a little bit about a lot of interesting things, but when I’m really trying to learn something about a specific topic, I’ll go to a more specific source. One of the best uses of 43 Things seemed to be in helping people figure out potential travel destinations, which had a more focused feel. So the creators have built a flavour called 43 Places to focus on that task.
After its first month online, 43 Places is still much smaller than its parent site: As per August 1, 2005, 43 Things had 50,000 subscribers. As I type, 43 Places has 7,139 subscribers. Despite these numbers, the new site doesn’t only povide more “focus”—it also makes for a more engaging experience since it is richly illustrated with user-supplied photos, many of which are hauled over from Flickr if they’re tagged for place and distributed under a Creative Commons license.
It might take English students some time to understand the interface and to find out how to move about the place and interact with fellow travelers, but 43 Places seems to make an excellent destination for an outing in social networking space.
Bonus links: Robot Co-op, Wikipedia on 43 Things, Technorati links for 43 Places.
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AJ
wrote on August 21, 2005:
You all have a great blog (thanks for the link Bee)! Lots of good links and fascinating thought seeds.
43 Places sounds great for students to explore, but to be honest, Im more interested for myself!
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