Congratulations to The Robot Co-op for releasing their new goal-setting social software app, 43 Things, in time for New Year resolutions. I've only added a few things to my account so far. I'm still working out the balance between private and public goals, but once I sort that out I'll add more things.

Another observation - I originally entered my goals in my own words, but I found myself converting some of those into the words of similar-sounding goals that were already shared by a group of people.

One example is that I originally came up with this goal: "Build a Web 2.0 business." That's what I've got written down in my personal notebooks, but on 43 Things I converted it to: "Start a company that survives longer than 2 years.". I did that because 46 other people share that particular goal and I want to link up with those like-minded people. If you click on the above link and view the goal, you'll see a long - and very interesting - list of comments that folks have made about the goal. A lot of inspiring stories about starting a company, motivations, suggestions, support, progress reports, etc. In summary, a loosely-formed community has gathered around that one goal. That's social software in a nutshell. ;-)

So I'm looking forward to defining my goals more on 43 Things and I encourage you to check it out for yourself.