Emerging Technologies Consulting

Today got off to an auspicious start as many of the sites I initially clicked on gave me an error or a 404 or had morphed into something else entirely.  That is the problem with many social software tools; they disappear quickly, especially in this economy. Two of today’s sites are from Robot Co-op, a group I ran into via their All-Consuming site, which many academic bloggers used to keep track of and share their reading lists.  They have 3 “43″ sites: 43 Things, 43 Places, and 43 People.  Today we’ll be looking at the first two.  In addition, we’ll look at a “file sharing” site, 4shared.com.

• 43 Things is a site where you can set goals for yourself.  I’ve used this site a couple of times.  One goal I set was to read all the books on my Amazon recommendation list.  No, it hasn’t happened.  Basically, you enter goals for yourself and often see that other people share those goals and you can share strategies and the ups and downs of meeting those goals.  There are a few educationally oriented goals.  One is “get a 3.75 gpa” and another is “get As on all my exams.”  Learning a new language is a popular goal as is writing a book and traveling.  There are also plenty of people who want to further their education–get a degree of some kind or get a GED.  The idea behind the site is to get support from others with similar goals, and that may be something students would be interested in having.  I find the site a little fluffy, though.  Cute, but without a lot of seriousness to the pursuit of goals.
• 43 Places is similar to 43 Things except that the goal is to travel to a specific place.  The interesting thing about the site is the photos and information that people post after they’ve visited.  If you want to visit a place, you can ask questions about where to eat, what to do, etc.  Generally, people do respond to these questions with good information.
• 4shared.com provides space for file storage, but in addition, allows you to share those files publicly.  I must admit, I find the site a little sketchy.  Browsing around available files, I found music, software, and video, and I’m not sure all of it is legitimate.  This is another thing to watch out for in social software–sites that might be operating in a gray area of the law.  Big sites like YouTube obviously end up with some content that is copyrighted, but in general, most of the content is truly user generated and free to distribute.