43Things Get-Together in San Francisco

Last Saturday my sweetie and I went over to the Mission District in San Francisco in order to meet a couple of people from 43Things.

I've been on 43Things for a couple of years, and I find it very helpful for clarifying goals. Sweetie takes it one step further, however. It's a community to her. These people are real.

Curiosity certainly took hold of me that morning as we headed on over to Ti Couz restaurant. Bookish, one of the steady posters on 43Things, picked out the restaurant. Since they don't take reservations, they suggested we show up at 10 am on a Saturday morning. Of course, due to my propensity to be early and be prepared for everything, we showed up closer to 9 than 10, so we stopped at a little cafe on the way to enjoy some coffee and tea. When we got to Ti Couz, they were barely opening up. 10 minutes later, Bookish showed up. She was a bit surprising to me: certainly introspective but terribly talkative, she is Indian-American, and, I discovered in our conversation later, she goes to India quite often.

We thought that only maybe two people would show. Much to our great surprise, we were a party of 7 (although half that amount arrived maybe 30 minutes into the hour).

I found it much easier to relate to these folks by their avatar names. I mean, who can meet 5 new people and remember two names for them? And some of them did, indeed, resemble their avatars. Bookish. Girl with a Curl. And the most famous one, Daniel Spils.

I thought Daniel looked familiar. He immediately admitted to a disease which eliminates all hair on his body, and that he's had this for about a decade. Very easy-going, loquacious, I had no idea, really, who he was. But his bald head, shiny in the lights, was familiar -- I had seen his face before on 43Things.

Seven people seated at two tables scrunched together doesn't make for one easy conversation. It makes for two or three. I listened primarily to Swaz and Bookish, as they were on my side of one of the tables. But because of the noise on the other side, and due to its interest, I found my concentration drifting over.

At the end of the morning's meeting, Daniel finally broke the conversational lines and started talking about the beginning of this social network called 43Things. I finally, suddenly, realized that he started the whole thing.

He and two friends got together in Seattle and put it together. 43 is a more obtainable number than, say, 100, and more meaningful than 10. They call themselves the Robot Co-Op, a great name when some people think any management is a conspiracy. It must be fairly successful. There are over a million users, Daniel told us, but only tens of thousands use it with any regularity. Rather than hook up with Amazon or some other large distributor, they have stuck with adsense ads for their revenue. That may change, however, in the future.