43 Places, Things, People, and more...

I've spent the last 4 hours playing with 43 Places, 43 Things, 43 People, All Consuming, and Lists of Bests, and I'm thoroughly impressed!

On the right side of my blog's homepage, I keep big lists of stuff I read/watch/listen to/take pics of. It's a real pain to maintain, and so I love the idea of easily managing a whole bunch of information in a structured way, and interacting with it in a bunch of different ways and in different contexts for a bunch of different purposes.

Today, I keep information all over the place. I keep a few dozen books I'm planning to read in my Amazon.com wishlist (and those I've already read on my bookshelf, which get limited exposure). I've rated hundreds of movies in my Netflix account, which only my 2 Netflix friends see.

And then of course there are a whole bunch of places like restaurants I've loved or hated stored away somewhere in the back of my mind (of course, I can't ever seem to think of any when looking for that perfect place to make some dinner reservations).

These are just the tip of the scenario icebergs being nailed by The Robot Co-op (the ~7 guys down the street from me who run the sites, with funding from Amazon.com).

Anyway, as I visit more cool places and do cool things, I plan on using these sites to track them (as well as places and things I haven't, but want to do!). Check my 43 People page or RSS feed if you want to keep up.

As for All Consuming and Lists of Bests, I love the concept, but they're new, and I couldn't get them to do everything I needed just yet. So, not quite ready to move over my book, movie, and other lists. But hopefully soon (this subject probably deserves a more thought-out post of its own).

As a sidenote, it's a rare occurrence lately that I find something so profound/original/promising (albeit not new) that I spend 4 hours playing with it on a Saturday night (and countless more hours thinking about it over the next weeks no doubt). Because there's no killer app or integration deals here yet, these sites are way under-hyped, leaving a lot of room to throw new ideas against the wall and see what sticks.

That's all for now. I'm completely scatterbrained, in part because I seem to have forgotten to eat since breakfast 10 hours ago. Oops.