I just checked out the site 43 things after it was featured on Salon. I’ve been following this folksonomy phenomenon for a while now. It’s very interesting. The basic concept is social networking like Friendster applied to knowledge.

I haven’t really started heavily using these new sites, but I’m slowly doing so (guess I’m not so digerati as I’d like to think!). For each site, you tag a piece of information (a photo at Flickr, a bookmark at del.icio.us, a goal or interest at 43 things) with keywords you make up (you don’t have to choose from a predefined list). This goes against the grain of most information architecture (IA) concepts of building a rigid hierarchical information structure. As you link things with words like “Paris”, you see other people who want to travel to Paris, other people’s pictures of Paris, bookmarks about where to go while in Paris, etc.

It’s not perfect yet, and the process of tagging all your information is tedious. The sites need applications and APIs that allow for auto-populate, mass selection/upload, etc. But the fascinating thing here is the emergent structure of information from the unrelated population of internet users. Collectively thousands/millions of users are imparting a little of their information and interests and building a repository of interconnected nodes of similar information. The possibilities of programs spidering this web of tagged information to provide contextual aid in other applications are endless. For example, once every street corner, every building, every address in the world has a picture loaded and properly labeled in a place like Flickr, another mapping or restaraunt guide application could go grab the appropriate images. I just wish I could write an app first that used all this in a novel way!

Oh, and an interesting little aside is that even though they don’t want everyone to know it yet 43 things behind the scenes is owned by Amazon who plans to make the site a community site that ties into A9 (their search engine) and Amazon.com. Just a thought…I wonder when Amazon and Google will merge? They’d make a great new competitor to MS in the internet field.