How many balls can you keep in the air at once? Two? Three? 43? From Amazon ==> Robot Co-op ==> 43things.com. Back in December I wrote about 43 Things here on The Social Software Weblog, and received 36 comments. Nine Seven (and now five) more comments and I would reach a nice symmetry on that post. Today Seattle Times writer Kristi Heim does a good job of covering the genesis of 43 Things and Josh Petersen et. al. over at The Robot Co-op. ...

Peter Griffin of The New Zealand Herald is loathe to share his to-do list with the new YASNS—43things.com. Especially since 43things has been revealed as yet another way for Amazon.com to sharpen their targeted, personalized ad services to an even finer edge. (in case you missed it: 43things.com is the creation of the Robot Co-op that is in turn owned by Amazon.com.) If you've dabbled with 43things, have you found it to be more 'therapeutic' than other forms of YASNS? Are you sharing your dreams and your desires to aspire to and achieve your goals? If connecting ads to all we share, express interest in, and consume online—books, music, electronics, blogs, photos, other's goals and achievements—and this type of focused advertising really worked, wouldn't we all be totally addicted to Amazon's 'recommendations'? Wouldn't we all be visiting our 'Recommended for You' pages at Amazon daily? Well, I'm not, and I don't… But perhaps you do? My ...

So we all know that Yahoo 360 is going to allow us to import RSS enabled content, like photos, and music, from non-Yahoo sources by now, yes? According to Paul Brody, director of Yahoo community products, Yahoo has also been listening to the feedback of its beta users, and is busy working on making their blogging environment much more flexible for us. And, they are going to add 'trackback'. Yep. In all, I've found the Yahoo 360 team to be very attentive during this beta test period. For everyone else not on Yahoo 360 yet, not to worry, it will be available to the general public in the next few weeks. Nice. UPDATE: 43 Things won one too for Social Networking of all things! Now how did i miss that?!? [John Ribeiro, IDG News Service] ...

As a travel buff, I'm digging on the new 43places social travel site, done by the 43things Robot Co-op folks. It's yet another Ruby on Rails site, cleanly designed and easy to use, and has the potential to become quite addictive. You can specify the places on your travel wishlist and find out what others have said about those locations, as well as flag the places you've been and rate them, relate an experience, and upload photos. There's also a — bless them — folksonomy component for tagging places, and a whole myriad of ways to find people you might want to connect with — because they're geographically close to you, they live in the places you want to go, or they want to go to the same places you do. Another way cool feature is that if you upload photos to Flickr, tag them with place names and use a Creative Commons license, 43places will pick them up via the magic that is web services. Now if you'll pardon me, I'm off to keep procrastinating feeding my wanderlust. See you in Tibet! ...

Jamal Hansen has developed a Ruby on Rails application that aggregates your tags from a good subset of the tagging sites to which you belong — currently supporting Flickr, del.icio.us, My Web 2.0, 43 Things, 43 Places, Jots, Dinnerbuzz, Tagzania, and Unalog. It presents the results in a tag cloud, alongside a selection list of "output" sites such that selecting a site and clicking a tag will take you to the tag page on that site. The idea is to cluster your tags by idea as opposed to by site, with an aim towards perceiving the "big picture" as opposed to isolated clusters on individual sites. Although I'm not actually convinced that my Flickr tags capture my ideas in the same way as the tags I use on del.icio.us or My Web 2.0, I'm fascinated by the interface and the ease of navigating quickly to tag areas on multiple sites. [Via del.icio.us/tag/tagging] ...

Another gem from eHub today, Keotag is a beautiful, multi-functional search engine that finds items tagged with your search term in 14 different tagging systems (Technorati, del.icio.us, shadows, 43 things, etc.).  Search results are returned quickly and displayed with a very nice AJAX interface.  There isn't support for Flickr or other photosharing apps, nor for video apps that support tagging, but it is so smooth and fast that I'll be probably be using this instead of TagCentral from now on.  See also the tag creation function for your blog posts.  Now if only they'd turn this into a bookmarklet or blummy plug-in. Systems like this are notoriously fly-by-night, but this one has AJAX, pastel colors and rounded corners.  So it's gotta be for real, right? ...