It looks like The Robot Co-op is on a roll. Their popular goal-sharing site 43things has spawned an off-shoot in 43places and another in 43people. Hmm...43things, 43places, 43people - there's a pattern there! It looks like the team is picking a social object and creating a goal-sharing community around it. So what else might people want to do, see and buy? And what next for The Robot Co-op? A quick search reveals that the team members have bought up an intriguing set of 43* domains...

43bands.com
43blogs.com
43events.com
43goals.com
43ideas.com
43links.com
43lists.com
43logins.com
43movies.com
43people.com
43places.com
43shows.com
43songs.com
43things.com
43trips.com

Hmm...so I guess we can expect a band-related site fairly soon - something along the lines of "which bands do you want to see?". 43movies would surely be a place to talk about movies you want to see and recommend movies you've already seen. And of course, these social objects are far better suited to advertising than 43things - you can expect to see Amazon ads popping up, for example. No doubt these sites will all form part of a network, allowing members to move freely between them. Perhaps a subscription model would work? If you look up these domains yourself, you'll notice the three that have been put to use (things, places, people) were all snapped up in 2004 - perhaps we can expect these services to be released in chronological order?

On the other hand, maybe they just bought up a host of 43* domains with no real intention to use them. I'm tempted to speculate more, but I'll leave that up to you...what does it all mean?

Pete Cashmore is an entrepreneur and internet expert. His favorite buzzwords are Ruby on rails, AJAX, blogging, Googlezon, home fabrication and RSS. He has a personal blog at mashable.com