What Do People Want to Do With Their Lives?

43 Things is a goal-setting community where people set goals, cheer each other on, and connect with others who are trying to achieve the same thing. Even if you’re not setting goals yourself, it’s still interesting and often amusing to see what others have set out to do e.g. go skinny dipping, have a one night stand, and be myself.

Visualizing Goals

I finally got a chance to play around with the 43 Things API and RSS feeds the other day. It was more an exercise than anything else, but the result turned out better than I thought they would – especially since I was making it while watching the Lakers versus Celtics game.

The visualization shows the most recently set goals on 43 Things. Each bubble is a goal. Bigger bubbles represent more people trying to achieve a goal, and when you click on a bubble, the goal is shown. Goals are updated every hour or so.

9 Comments

  • Very interesting. I’ve just started looking in to the Processing language and thinking about doing some visualizations myself. What was this particular 43 Things visualization written in ?

  • Gordon – I wrote it in actionscript with PHP as the data proxy. Oh, and I use Flex Builder Pro 3 as my IDE.

  • what do the colors and velocity of the bubbles represent ?

    at first i found it hard to click on them, especially smaller faster ones, but then it became sort of “game like” and kinda cool.

    I like it!

  • what do the colors and velocity of the bubbles represent ?

    at first i found it hard to click on them, especially smaller faster ones, but then it became sort of “game like” and kinda cool.

    I like it!

  • Hi Nathan,

    The visualization is not working anymore, maybe it has to do with tableu.

    Regards,
    Marcela

    • @nananaina I made this a couple of years ago (in Flash) and broke something somewhere in between switching servers. Never got around to fixing it.

    • @flowingdata so sad, I was expecting to be able to use it in a paper I am writing.

      Best regards!

  • Definitely gonna check this site out; novel concept. Thanks for sharing!