Casa Jonsson

I just bumped into an interesting social software site. 43 Things is to your life goals and to-do list what Flickr is to your photos. Type a description of something you want to accomplish and you can see how it relates to the goals and experiences of tens of thousands of other users. You can display up to 43 items in your list of things to do. Such a constraint would not have cramped the apostle Paul’s style, but I’m not so sure about myself. (By the way, the name of the site is a reference to a wildly popular personal productivity technique called GTD which advocates the use of exactly 43 folders in a filing system.)

Another cool network-effect site (also built with my new technological passion, the Ruby on Rails web application framework) is Backpack. Like a real backpack that has pockets for everything, you can cram lots of your life into your virtual Backpack and lug it with you wherever you want to go (that is, wherever you’ll have Internet access). You have control over who gets to peek into different pockets of your Backpack. For now all I’m carrying is a short list of wines I want to try and good movies I’m waiting for Netflix to add to their library.