Did you ever launch a project that deserved popularity, but inexplicably failed? Something you still think could have changed the world? Post a link here.
Never "launched" it, but I still think it deserves popularity :).
It's a browser start page that I made for myself (and use) that displays the top stories for a set of most-emailed-like feeds. The feeds have been tweaked over time to yield the most interesting stories at any given time. After all, they were the most emailed ones...
It's not really for news junkies or the news.yc crowd in particular. However, it could work for you as I am in the news.yc crowd. Anyway, almost everyone I have explained it to and that has tried it as their homepage has liked it. That is, I've gotten really good feedback in terms of constant use from friends and family.
So I think there is some non-negligible subset of people who would like this as their home page, but I of course have no way to reach them :)
If you do click on it, note it isn't just one story. You can click the arrows on screen or use the arrows on your keyboard to move off the front story. But if you have as your home page, the latest story will just be displayed.
I have to say the arrow key navigation is awesome. I hate to have to click all over and the fact that there is only one story at a time yet I can navigate to others easily is very appealing.
Totally agree with other posters. This is a neat interface - I like how it completely takes away the clutter, allowing you to focus on the current story.
User configurable, perhaps? No-cycling, custom feed selections, etc.
Personally, I would like longer excerpts...two to four line excerpts just don't cut it for me. However, I presume that's a function of the provider's feed settings.
Also, some of the feeds are just...meh. I don't care for Abby, Drudge, etc.
Most of the excerpt lengths are from the feeds, though I am cutting it off after one paragraph. The idea is you would quickly move through them and click through to the story if you want.
I don't understand your question about the new page. Can you please expand? There shouldn't be a new page load for each story, i.e. when you hit the arrow keys it should be taking the excerpts from memory.
As for the feed choice, these are just general interest feeds of course. I've thought about custom feeds, but then this just becomes another feed reader (and a worse one at that). I think its usefulness stems from the aggregation, i.e. you do no work to get a snapshot of the most emailed stories out there. And since they are not your feeds, you don't really care if you miss something.
That being said, I can really see some sub-watrcoolrs. What would you think of a hacker oriented one? Any feed ideas?
Also, what do you mean by "no-cycling?" Thanks for the feedback.
Well, I'm certainly interested in spreading it, I just don't have any great ideas for how to do so. At one point I had it so you could email the links off the site to other people, but it wasn't used much so I dropped it in favor of dropping clutter.
Thanks. I saw your comment on not liking the stories :)
Do you think you would use a tech subwatrcoolr? If so, what "most emailed" equiv. feeds do you think there are in tech. I can think of programming.reddit.com, equivalent digg section, news.yc, yahoo most emailed tech.
A desktop metasearcher + archiver + personal search engine. It got lost in the noise when Google & Yahoo had their pissing match over desktop search in late 2004. The failure wasn't inexplicable: it was just too much work for one person... which makes the quote on the bottom of the page bitterly ironic.
Failed social network advertising system that targets advertisements to Facebook Application users, by profile keywords (interests, activities), age, gender, specific networks, etc. Also targets ads throughout the web in participating partner websites.
Apparently no interest, and then Facebook launched Social Ads, with similar targeting features a month or so later.
Was hoping to integrate it with other social networks (Bebo, MySpace, Hi5, etc) and integrate with other websites to serve highly targeted advertising.
Also, ask me in a month, and I'll see how well my current venture is going. :/
Very impressive. I was going to say, "for a 15 year old", but that demeans the work--it's impressive, regardless of age, to build something like that in a short time frame with a small team.
And very astute from a business perspective. Every time there is an ad network acquisition my first thought is, "Wow, that must be the last one of those", because there have been so many, and all of the really well-known names have already been acquired. But the reality is that advertising on the web is becoming more important every day, and more valuable every day. It will continue to grow at the same pace as the Internet itself, and so any innovative advertising play is probably a smart one. Mobile advertising is also a world that is currently untapped.
And, interestingly, at least to me, advertising is a market where no matter how many established players there are, there's always room for someone to be "high touch" in a particular industry and be able to build a nice sized business. My brother-in-law works in old media advertising (which has been a well-settled market for over fifty years), and yet he's built an independent agency over the past twelve years or so that employs a number of people and makes plenty of money (where "plenty"==$millions). He does it by building relationships, and doing good work.
'I was going to say, "for a 15 year old", but that demeans the work'
And 15 yr olds. I mean, I've met some kids who are better hackers than I would ever dream of being -- I'm guessing that markbao is in that category. So concentrating on the guy's age seems like completely the wrong take on this.
I second this. Very clean but also dramatic. Good work on the logo, too.
The "learn more" section under "advertiser" states that "Cadmium provides a deep data collection system". Did you design something of an analytics dashboard as well? If it looks half as nice as the rest of the site, I'd be impressed.
Isn't it obvious? It's one character shorter. Just like one of Arc's guiding principles: "How code looks matters: short names, no swearing". Of course, since ones name is so frequently typed, one might prefer something even shorter. Like, "Joe", as a purely hypothetical example. I'm not sure one can go any shorter than three characters for a common male US name.
More seriously, I'm guessing Mark/Steven is of Asian descent (Bao make this seem more likely). They don't necessarily take their American name very seriously, since it's not their "real" name. I've known several Asian folks who've gone through a couple of Americanized names over the span of a few years. Their Japanese or Chinese or Vietnamese or Thai name stays the same throughout.
Most Asian Americans I know take their "American" names very seriously, as it's their legal, social, and personal identity.
Growing up Asian in the US, I hated when kids always asked me for my "real" name. I have a Chinese name, as well as an English name. Both are aliases for the person and both are "real".
Apologies for implying otherwise. I was primarily referring to Asians who grew up in Asia and still call Asia home, but that do business with Americans. I promise I won't ask you your "real" name.
Yes, I did. It was previously something Chinese, which I changed to Steven a year or so before, and decided that it wasn't what I liked, so Mark is what I changed it to.
Maybe someone should create a site that collects sites like these... abandoned, mostly-finished ideas. People could go there for inspiration and stuff.
It'd be kinda meta if I created such a site, then submitted that site to itself when no one showed up. :)
A forum designed without the use of text using just images to communicate with a built in editor and voting tools. Roommate and I made it as a toy for a programming competition, so we weren't expecting grand things. It got grabbed by the 4chan crowd so... uh... yeah. I linked to the best ones for a reason ;)
No real idea of where to take it from here. We have a few ideas that break from the theme of no text, such as tagging and a reddit style interface, and improved ways for the community to segregate out the flock of penises.
We did the bulk of it as a 48 hour coding competition with the theme of 'antitext'. I wanted to make something in Django, and my roommate wanted to make something in flash. So from the start there was no real direction aside from the neatness factor and wanting to see if we could pull it off.
that's simply the mysterious way in which 4chan operates. but it's a good observation. maybe this tool can attract a different niche audience if there was a way to create a fresh, empty canvas forum that wouldn't intersect with the current website in too many ways.
Kickass! When you paste the Disclaimer text into the box, it suggests "the darjeeling limited" and "potty training". The first three paragraphs of Yegge gave me "faithfulness" and "registry cleaner". Just make it work, and it will be awesome.
Yes, we have. What we do is not keyword extraction, our tool suggests tags based on probabilistic algorithms. For example, if your document contains the terms Bush and Obama it should be tagged as politics even if that word is not present in it. Compare to the Yahoo Extraction Tool, for example. This approach will not add new keywords that would help in a search. It's only useful to have an idea of what the document is about.
The main problem is not the algorithm but the input data. Our system learns from millions of tagged blog posts among other sources. The quality of the tags varies a lot, and most of the work we do is about deciding what data to use for training.
Not that it was built to change the world, but I've personally been very happy with http://www.iheartquotes.com/
It was a two day project to bring the Unix fortune program to the web. You can browse online but I've gotten more use out of the API which I turned into a Twitter bot and include in my .bash_profiles.
I guess hackers like building websites but making them grow is something entirely different. For me, it is extremely hard to focus at a single app and make it grow. Instead, I find it more enjoyable to churn out more and more websites whether anybody visits them or not. Maybe its good, maybe its bad. What do you guys say?
It was our project for awhile and I still think community driven ranked lists of the best of any given category would be great for online shopping and finding new bars and making recommendations, but it just didn't work out how we wanted. We got bogged down on to many things, made it to complicated, and focused on bad pieces... So the project is now just chilling as we are starting a new project.
Not big or world changing but something I would have thought people would find useful. It's a mortgage calculator that actually works out the useful numbers for you, i.e. repayment costs taking inflation into account, discounted periods, extra payments and a nice graph at the end:
http://fidness.com is my little pet project. I've never let it get out to more than a few of my nerd-ish friends, who inconveniently don't do enough physical activity to get anything out of the site. I don't know if that's their fault for being lazy or mine for having an underwhelming site.
We have this Social Classifieds Network that is trying to inject more trust in to online classifieds but it's hard to get above the noise of craigslist and kijiji. Not a failure yet but not a success either.
http://www.pokerup.us
Poker-based social community. Find and create home poker games, online poker games. Poker league management and promotion for pub poker and online tournaments.
It's supposed to be a community for finding out about and then getting into interesting internships or graduate jobs. It seemed to catch on a bit for a couple of positions, but has declined since then.
My own interest in the site dropped significantly once I got my final internship and graduate job, and I guess this generalises to most potential users.
Just a place to vent frustrations. A friend of mine and I built this in a weekend. There's a blog post somewhere describing the tale.
We made it on techcrunch. We made it on digg and reddit. There was a short spike of traffic. A little bit of foreign media coverage and then silence.
It seems adsense doesn't appreciate our ideas or those of our posters. It also seems that the adwords we bought seem to either never be searched for or that google doesn't like our domain.
I quickly threw this site together for myself because I wanted a way to compare real estate that I was thinking about purchasing. It's nothing earth shattering but I found it useful in helping me organize my research when I was looking to buy a house.
I have some more ideas that will make it more useful - I've just never implemented them because I ended up buying a house! Do you think others would find this site useful?
Like Yelp, but more for blogging about restaurants, instead of writing reviews. I noticed that people were using the 'review' space in Yelp to write about their own personal experiences which were irrelevant to the review. So, I thought there could be a market for this.
This was one of the very first websites I created and left it more or less half finished.
Certainly not world changing, and most definitely not ready for prime time. But considering it's a couple of guys throwing things at a server a couple of times a month more as stress relief than anything, it's not THAT bad.
Just launched, so not dead yet. Got 100 or so registrations, but no one seems to want to post anything. "Can't find anything that's cool" is the excuse. Anyway, the site is a unique way to list and vote on any item you think is cool.
http://thatscool.org I'll send you an invite, pronto. Add something, anything!!
A lot of people roll their own popurls.com site. I wrote one, too, to teach myself the Apache Wicket framework. This one is for web developers. http://devfunnel.com.
I was going to add the ability to "follow" it on twitter, but I've run out of steam, and no one seems very interested in it. I've moved onto other projects. :)
Yeah, that's why I added the collapsible arrow thingies at the left-hand side, to hide specific languages. I was going to eventually persist their open/closed state w/ cookies. I might still do it, but it's hard to get the motivation to work on it when I get fewer than five page hits a day. :/
I tried it maybe 2 years ago. I signed in a month later and noticed there was a vendor button (or something like it) where it listed my name and address in public location for everybody to see, along with that of all other users. I think it was a list of "vendors" (ie, to buy from other thinkcomp users.) The page was white. There was no way to disable it. I ended up e-mailing somebody to remove my name from the list.
I'm not sure that it beats QuickBooks, even though I haven't tried either product recently. And I wouldn't worry about Facebook.
This isn't an entirely fair criticism. The section you are talking about was labeled "Marketplace," and it was intended to be a way for users of the software to find other companies to either network with or buy/sell from/to. It was completely independent of the "Vendors" section and had no bearing on the accounting aspects of the software. The feature has since been removed, in any case, since I didn't have enough time to work on it.
It's basically a web version of Delicious Library (not del.icio.us. Think delicious monster, mac fans).
I didn't really launch it per se, so I can't say that it failed, but if I don't have people using/looking at it, I'm finding it hard to convince myself to fix all the egregious bugs.
Social weather forecasting, with a Google Map mashup and some social networking features. Launched in late 07, haven't had time to really promote so it's not deadpool yet. Although I have no users :(
http://esposure.com recently launched. It hasn't quite failed, but nobody visits really. It's a place where you can post screencasts/demos of whatever it is you or your Web app does.
http://www.mylistwatcher.com - We Watch Your Amazon Wish Lists and will alert you when the price of any item meets your target price. Never miss a bargain again!
We liked the idea of automatically tagging your links based on what you were searching for, but with all the link/bookmark sites we kind of lost interest.
http://nshrine.com/ A place where social networking communities can share shrines, memorials, etc. It still has a chance, but its growth is pretty disappointing.
resently I released http://www.fictionthis.com/ - "allows you to share ideas and have unbiased input into creating a published work of quality fiction. This open project was developed for inspired members of our online community to create their own version of the story and to rate their fellow authors."
I thinks its a great idea, but traffic has been slowly disappearing.. feedback anyone?
bitpal.com - bitpal is a cross platform personal information manager designed to live on a thumb drive. It manages your contacts todos and calendar that sycs between two or more copies (think home and work)of outlook and even betwen outlook and mac (iCal and address book).
Never could get the flash drive companies to figure out their biz models. Its a great little tool. www.bitpal.com
when i was in college i created the site, icantspelldostoevsky.com.
it was kind of a play on words, there was never a correct way to spell dostoevsky, and since he was an existential man, the site was meant as a philosophical discussion playground. think wiki for philosophy, but at the time wikimedia was not around yet, and i used bulletin board software.
http://free.LocalDataPlace.com - which we built for local recycling (ala freecycle). We haven't been willing to spam existing freecycle groups but we need good local traction to catch on.
You should look for groups focused on recycling and sustainability and promote your site to them as a way to do that. Obviously don't be spammy, but if you get involved in the overall discussion then people will be interested in what you have to say about your site. Look around Google Groups for related communities.
If it's having trouble getting nationwide traction, just focus on a specific region initially (such as where you live) -- do some networking and get the site name out there.
I've got something similar to that - http://relovable.com/ - designed to target the parenting niche. Kids grow (zing!) through clothes at an alarming rate.
I never bothered to attempt to market it at all - it was more a proof-of-concept that I could do something with Rails. Still think it has value though.
Never "launched" it, but I still think it deserves popularity :).
It's a browser start page that I made for myself (and use) that displays the top stories for a set of most-emailed-like feeds. The feeds have been tweaked over time to yield the most interesting stories at any given time. After all, they were the most emailed ones...
It's not really for news junkies or the news.yc crowd in particular. However, it could work for you as I am in the news.yc crowd. Anyway, almost everyone I have explained it to and that has tried it as their homepage has liked it. That is, I've gotten really good feedback in terms of constant use from friends and family.
So I think there is some non-negligible subset of people who would like this as their home page, but I of course have no way to reach them :)
If you do click on it, note it isn't just one story. You can click the arrows on screen or use the arrows on your keyboard to move off the front story. But if you have as your home page, the latest story will just be displayed.