43things.com is a site where you can list your goals, make entries on them and buddy up with other people doing them. As the official blurb says:
It is surprisingly effective - the process of working out what you want to do, and what you have already done, is variously inspiring and depressing. And once you have set some goals, it becomes a lot easier to achieve them, since they are there nagging you in the public domain.
A lot of the early goals involved travel, so then they created 43places.com which is directly linked to 43things but has several features specific to travel goals. Next up was 43people.com which is kind of a social networking site, or at least is slightly more networky than the other two. There is also a site called All Consuming, but its lame. A rare failure.
43things and its siblings are the creation of the Robot Co-op, an Amazon.com company, but it is run on completely independent lines, and has a real start-up feel about it. I mailed them for help last weekend after I got spam-tagged (in the spirit of independence their email address is a gmail account) and I got a personal reply a few hours later from the legendary Daniel Spils saying they were on the case. Had it been Amazon it would have been a standard blurb from an anonymous email address.
So why would Amazon want to spend money on this? It certainly isn't to monetize the 43*.com sites. There are plenty of reasons though, which I will explain in another post sometime, but it is certainly nothing sinister.
There are now 136,000 people on 43 things, which is impressive - it was 5,000 when I joined in March. My 43things are here.