37 Signals just announced that they finished their collaboration with The Robot Co-op, and have recently launched 43 Things (Here's the Coop announcement).

43 Things allows you to list your goals, and uses social networking as a feature (which the folks at Flickr also understand is its best use) to help you find others with the same goals, others who have accomplished the same goal, and other goals you may be interested in.

As an aside, I heard somewhere that the Robot Coop guys are ex-Amazon folks. Gotta say I love that "If you liked X, you may also be interested in Y" Amazon feature--there are so many uses for it.

"If you liked the UConn Huskies, you may also be interested in the Quinnipiac Bobcats."

"If you liked Mary-Kate, you may also be interested in Ashley."

etc.

Anyways, I played with 43 Things in beta awhile back, and I wasn't really impressed, but the product has come a long way in terms of visual design, and it feels like a much better application now. Not sure what funtionality has been added since I played with it, but the 37 Signals mantra of "the interface is the software" certainly has me liking 43 Things a lot more now. It clearly was developed with Simplicity as a guiding visual and interaction design principle, which makes it a pleasure to use.

I'd like to see some more features to help me accomplish my goals, like:

• What my friends / family / co-workers want to do
• What those who live near me want to do: "563 people in Connecticut want to leave the state" (Meetup.org integration?)
• A one-page list of people who have accomplished a goal with their messages. For example, here's a list of the 11 people who drink 8 glasses of water a day. 8 people have comments about their experience, but I have to click a total of 16 times to read them all (click through, read, hit the back button, click through, read, hit thte back button, lather, rinse, repeat)
• "Trusted" tutorial writers, like Amazon's reviewer system. i.e. "Did this person help you accomplish your goal? Yes / No"
• Display helpful comments about a goal somewhere. Chronology matters less in this context than relevance or helpfulness of content; maybe sort them by the results of a "Did this review help you? Yes / No" query?
• Dropcash integration--"help me raise money to run the Tokyo Marathon"

It's pretty rippin' right now though. Check it out, you likely won't be disappointed.

Also, Here are my goals (only four now, but the list is growing.

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