Should Do This: The Robot Coop's Suggestion Box

The Robot Coop's site 43Things prompts users to answer the question "What should I do with my life?". Today they have launched a new product, Should Do This, which prompts people to tell others what they should do. It's a great way for people to give an idea to any company, person, event, or product under the sun.

The Robot Coop's network of sites all focus on a thing rather than just people that you know. To connect with someone you have to actually agree about something or share an opinion on something. Each of their sites traffics in a different "something": 43things uses goals, 43places uses geographical places, 43people is focused on people you know or would like to know, allconsuming is on physical things like food or media, and Should Do This traffics in suggestions. Just like their other sites members can add a suggestion, show support for or against a suggestion. Feel free to send me suggestions for O'Reilly Radar or Ignite Seattle.

At its inception, the Robot Coop created a site to get user's ideas. These sites served as inspiration for Should Do This. As they put it:

The idea for Should Do This grew out of a site we used to run called “ideas.43things.com”. The Ideas site was for giving feedback about 43 Things and worked great for a while, but we also learned it was confusing to a lot of people. Many people just got on ideas.43things.com and listed their goals like they were on 43 Things. Can’t really blame them as it looked the same (silly robots!).

Enter Should Do This. What we discovered from the Ideas site was that creating an easy-to-use suggestion box that was visible to the whole community of users allowed people to rally around and support a good idea. So we’ll be bringing back “ideas.43things.com” but it will link to our suggestion box on Should Do This. The same is true for the other sites we run.

Up til now the Robot Coop has survived on Google Ads and some funding from Amazon. With Should Do This they will be venturing into a subscription service. If you are an entity getting suggestions on Should Do This and want to be able to respond "officially" you can pay $35 a month to become the moderator. This competes with European site Feedback 2.0. You'll be able to customize the page and domain map it. It'll be interesting to see if this revenue stream takes off. I wonder how they will deal with the namespace issue; I accidentally created three variations on O'Reilly Radar while writing this review.

Here are some other tidbits about Should Do This. The site accepts OpenID (43things is a provider). Members can vote on the probability of a suggestion happening and guess at the timeline of something getting done.

I like the site. There certainly no shortage of people with opinions looking for a place to share them and this certainly is a cleaner way method than forums. It will be interesting to see how the subscriptions grow. Will companies be "forced" to use the site because their users are there or will they flock to this simple solution for managing customer feedback?