43T Paper 1

Nice description on 43 Things and I really enjoyed reading. I'm also a new member of 43T and your paper helped me better understand the community. Also I liked that you integrated the concepts from readings into your paper.

One thing I want to push is that you may want to explain part 3 (the community of practice) more in detail. Since you acknowledged you're a new member now, you'll find more about 43T that is not explicit to new users as you explore 43T. For example, you may find shared repertoires that are not technological affordances.  For example, what are the things and ways that newbies may not understand or even regulars may not be aware of?

I found 43T is a very interesting community - a new type of social networking site. If you keep examining it in addition to what you've described in this paper, a number of interesting stories are likely to come out.

Hi Ayça, thought I'd comment too:

I really enjoyed your paper. I might be biased (since I use 43T) but I think you did a really good job of describing the community.

I also think you're spot on with your understanding of the site's joint enterprise as listing and accomplishing your life's goals (even if our goals are not the same). I think this is an interesting (and newish) phenomenon: social sites that exist only to be social and not as connections to some other goal or real world group.

I look forward to reading the other parts of your paper because I think you'll really be pushing the readings for this class, especially the older ones; I don't know if those authors could anticipate this direction for eCommunties.

I think you may also want to examine 43T's "report a similar goal" feature as an additional way of solidifying a shared repertoire (in this case goal terms). This feature allows users to submit similarly termed goals and allows other users a simple way to swap one goal for the more "appropriate" terminology.

Does you think this aids in the creation of shared meaning for users on the site? Or does it kill finer shades of meaning as users attempt to conform to some 'standard' that is decided by group-think?