What are we all working on?
What is there to say about 43 Things? It’s hard to pinpoint because it’s just an idea… for now…
Let’s start with my list. I must say, there’s a certain joy to see how many users have picked up on things that you created. Who knew there were other 43 Things users who wanted to promote Alien Loves Predator? And when I added “learn new things every day” did I really expect that to get more additions than “Impeach Bush?”
The nice thing about 43 Things is that while the collaborative pieces are growing organically in the new folksonomy model of Flickr, delicious, and the like, the product itself is growing organically—as one of the developers writes, this development is being done in stages, and one of the major stages is asking people what the tool should be. I’m not sure anything like this has happened before, even in the realm of open-source software.
43 Things is just another sign of the new breed of internet user who seeks not only community but also aggregation. It’s not enough we want to see our data, but we want to see how many other people share our data. It’s a strictly objective way of seeing how we belong beyond meatspace. It’s also a further extension of how we innately like to work with others, because 43 Things is a simple enough idea which is easily duplicated. However, the authors are being transparent in the development of the tool, so it’s extremely comfortable for us to put our interest into the site and see how it evolves. Over time we will feel a shared ownership in the result, and huzzah, you have a regular user base with real attachment to the site, and a site that assuredly answers the needs of its users.
Great software products have user testing cycles that are similar to this, too. Their testing cycles aren’t just about getting the product out there and having people find bugs, they’re also extremely interested in hearing how other people use the software or want to. Here, they are not taking the role of project masters but project directors. As much as they can completely control how the project evolves, they also listen for new ideas and differing opinions from testers and expertly select or tweak those ideas and adopt them into the original vision.
But as Frontline offered with its segment on former psychologist and marketing guru Clotaire Rapaille on “The Persuaders”, people cannot tell you what they really want. I’ve also recently read evidence of this in Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice—when people are forced to explain a choice, they enter a state when they talk themselves into an idea, or they might suppress a preference for fear of being ostracized for it. One study Professor Schwartz references in his book involves a group study of college students who get to rate a set of posters, ranging from art reproductions, to those featuring cartoon characters or animals. Half of this group had to write short descriptions as to why they rated the posters the way they did, the other half only had to assign a 1-to-5 ranking to them, and after the session, everyone could take one home. Not surprisingly, the half that didn’t have to explain their decisions usually chose the art reproductions, and when surveyed later, were still pleased with their decisions. And yet the half that did write down their reasons were less pleased with their choice, less likely to have the poster hanging on their wall, and more likely to want to sell it. Beyond Rapaille’s idea that our rational minds obscure what our reptilian brains truly want, we find when we need to express what we want we often struggle with the words to do so, so we attach ourselves to the words and concepts we do use, which only leads us to disappointment, because we didn’t express our desires properly to being with.
This is where things like folksonomy show amazing value, because it does capture action before any categorical thought, or at least as much as the user is willing to invest. But this only means that kind of effort only comes from those who want it—the rest will sort and tag as much as they want in the moment. Without someone else’s concept of how things should be organized, we are free to immediately use the terms we want to, and the result is a true impression of which things work, and not simply how people react to the terms that are offered.
How much further can we take this? We’ve covered photos, bookmarks and to-do items. What about folksonomy politics? Take it out of bleeding-edge internet and stick it in the Census: let the surveyed write down free-form words or phrases regarding what worries them in government and what they like. Apply the collaborative filtering later, and map relevance between phrases in the process. Without the framing of explicit questions or even bills up for vote (but still victim to the usual influence of politics and the news media), you’ll be that much closer to people’s real concerns and satisfactions.
