43Things + All Consuming
About one year ago, I signed up for All Consuming (AC) service for tracking books that I’ve read (and currently reading) in my blog. The service was neat but unreliable. It was slow and often inaccessible. After a while, I abandoned it. This morning I suddenly received an email from Eric Benson from AC. He announced that 43Things have acquired AC, and invited all subscribers to visit the new service.
I’ve used 43Things before and tho I was initially excited about it, I soon realized that it was not that useful. The acquisition, however, challenged my earlier opinion. They suddenly give me enough reason to come and use it more regularly since I’m currently reading (quite a lot of) books. The integration of 43Things and All Consuming was a good idea and was essential for its survival.
Earlier, I didn’t have enough reasons to use 43Things regularly - I didn’t see the point of updating things that I’d like or I’ve done regularly. First, I prefer to do the actual things than updating my list. Second, things that I’d like to do are usually recurrent. Finally, I have a blog, thus I prefer updating my blog than writing my stories there. With All Consuming, 43Things is suddenly becoming much more useful. With its search feature, it is easier to track book that I read: find, add, and update (cover image included!) - better than using Amazon manually. I can read opinions on that book and even find people with similar interest (All Consuming display other people who read the same book). By looking at their profile, I might actually find other book that of my interests (something like Amazon’s recommender system). The profile of the user is further enriched with the original 43Things features - the “wish” and “been there done that” lists. The acquisition seems make sense, and I kinda happy about it.
What’s next? How about better and more usable UI? It is a bit messy - mixing books, movie, and music all together. The tagging system is not really useful than “Last few things consumed…” feature, perhaps because I didn’t really have many items to be tagged. I’d rather emphasize “the last few things” than the “today’s tag” feature. I’d add “so-so” to mediate between worth and not worth doing; and better completion date feature (by adding month and year? I can’t recall exact date when I completed doing the task). Finally, here’s my 43Things+All Consuming profile.