Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1493237

by mcgyver • 16 years ago

59 92 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Also curious to know the probable reasons for the failure.

jaxn• 16 years ago

I built a tool called Statzen that I shutdown because it didn't get traction. It had a feature that would show you what topics/tags from your blog were getting read (via web and/or rss) and what sub-topics within that topic were getting read most.

I think I should have just released that one feature as an MVP.

seanMeverett• 16 years ago

I'm intrigued by ur feature MVP. As a simple marketing/analytics tool for bloggers, this would help figure out the most popular keywords on site versus off site search SEO. BUILD IT AND I WILL COME! :)

frossie• 16 years ago

Documentation.

Probable reason: some people would rather perform their own appendectomy than read a manual.

Seriously, I have often included features on strong user request (MUST! HAVE!) against my own better judgement, only to find that, surprise, they are not used. I don't necessarily regret it, there is a certain advantage to looking responsive regardless of the request.

carbocation3• 16 years ago

Ooh, I've got a couple. I'll just use one for an example though:

http://college.mychances.net/tools/college-choice-matrix.php

This tool is based on ~25,000 college applications and shows you the relative preference for each college. It's not based on direct matchups but instead based on an Elo point system, so that all colleges can be ranked along one dimension (essentially, revealed student preference).

It's rarely used because it's really hard to find on the site. It's also tough to figure out how to choose the schools that show up, instead of just looking at the defaults. It's also possible that college applicants care way less about this sort of thing than I, a processor and curator of their data, do.

bmr• 16 years ago

Assuming you've looked into it, how impossible is it to license all of a school's admission data (i.e. every applicant's GPA, SAT, and admission status) in some anonymous format?

I would have loved a tool that that would let me enter a GPA and SAT score and then using actual data could tell me that 500 students with comparable stats (like +/- 0.1 for GPA and +/- 50 for SAT) applied to school X last year and 380 were admitted.

carbocation3• 16 years ago

It's true that it would make my life a lot easier since I wouldn't have to collect this information myself from individuals. I just rely on self-reporting and statistical techniques to achieve approximate results. Now that you mention it, it would be interesting to get the full data from one school and see how close to the truth we actually get.

mbenjaminsmith• 16 years ago

I built an events search that aggregated data from several sources - upcoming, last.fm, etc. It didn't work out, mostly because even with multiple sources of events and a lot of data massaging, it was hard to get more than a page of results for any location / topic. At its best, it would just show a page of random results for a givne location, which was probably what it should have been in the first place (an aggregate calendar).

chaosmachine3• 16 years ago

I guess it'd be this entire website (visual amazon search):

http://bigbooksearch.com/

Reason for failure? Google doesn't index search results...

idoh3• 16 years ago

That site has a ton of potential. I'm sure with some tweaks here and there it could really take off.

chaosmachine3• 16 years ago

It made the front page of Reddit a while back. My plan was to get traffic organically, but the site is basically one big violation of Google's policies (no original content, it's all search results, etc). The site doesn't even rank for it's own name, although it did for a few days after launch, until Google took notice, and blacklisted it.

I'd love to hear ideas for making something like this indexable. Generating a bunch of quality content around search results seems difficult (see: Mahalo), but maybe there's another approach I haven't thought of?

joubee• 16 years ago

I like this site - its cool :) I know its going against the point of the site but you could use the DOM to scrape the Product details and display them as links (you can link to any site without copyright infringement??) - if you don't want text you could always pass a small amount of info into the alt tags. If this sounds dumb feel free to ignore. But I like the idea of the site

qeorge• 16 years ago

I remember this site, I like it.

Regarding Google indexing the site, was that toungue-in-cheek? If not, you may want to consider some basic changes to the structure - I think its less that Google doesn't like your site and more that there's very little there to index.

sdfx• 16 years ago

What about curated author pages? Maybe with some information about the author and a list of his books by publishing date. I know, this may be too close to the Mahalo-model, but it could help with your low number of pages to index. You could start with your top searched authors.

And maybe you could show a little more information about the book when you click on it. I'm not sure what data Amazon provides - there must be more than just the picture, no?

keyle• 16 years ago

That is cool. Now if you could do that with every book shop...

thegyppo2• 16 years ago

Check out Rapidlibrary, they managed to turn a search engine into a top 1000 website. You have to be careful with taking the "creating pages around latest searches" approach, have a look at the latest searches on Rapidlibrary to see what I'm talking about.

Like another commenter pointed out you will need to create static pages for the search engines to find & index. You can do this by creating them automatically from the last x number of searches, if you were able to aggregate some other sources into the engine you could create custom landing pages showing all results rather than people clicking straight off to Amazon & having no dedicated page for each book title.

chriseidhof• 16 years ago

Make it an iPad app?

sireat• 16 years ago

I had forgotten about your site, I still think it looks and works great. In fact, I remember liking your site so much, that I submitted to HN..

How low has the traffic fallen? If you can't get search traffic, maybe there are some other traffic sources?

Usually horizontal scrolling fails miserably, but at bigbooksearch it "feels" natural.

retube2• 16 years ago

Can you clarify what you mean by "Google doesn't index search results" ? Looking at your site, it doesn't seem as if there are any links to crawl.

superk3• 16 years ago

To understand... are you expecting Google to enter every possible search term into your search box and index the results? BTW, your site _requires_ javascript = SEO fail.

minalecs• 16 years ago

have you looked at http://picclick.com/ .. you have something, i think you're just missing the boat. Picclick has been getting a lot of traction as of late.

AmberShah2• 16 years ago

I think this one is awesome. I hate the teeny tiny pictures in Amazon - it does not compare to seeing books in the store. The downside is I don't really know what to search for. I like to go to a certain section (literature, programming, etc) and browse.

d0m2• 16 years ago

I've got a personal todo application that's aimed for lazy people. I've seriously tried a dozen of "smart todo", and no one were good for me. The one I built is special because it is so simple, flexible, and it does more than what a paper agenda can do.

I could publish it but I would need to modify lots of thing to make it intuitive for new users, write docs, and basically just to make it "public".

carbocation3• 16 years ago

> I could publish it but I would need to modify lots of thing to make it intuitive for new users, write docs, and basically just to make it "public".

None of those sound like prerequisites for publishing something. Is the functionality there, and is the tool modestly resistant to things like SQL injection? If so, why not put a link out there (like, say, in this thread)?

proexploit• 16 years ago

Please do, I'd owe myself a try without docs. I've tried everything too.

DaveChild3• 16 years ago

I'd be up for trying that if you want testers. I'm lazy and need a decent todo app.

d0m2• 16 years ago

Thanks for your interest. I can't publish it without some major tweaking but I'll work on them.

ww5202• 16 years ago

Bread Crumb for Emacs, http://breadcrumbemacs.sourceforge.net.

I use it constantly everyday as I built it for myself. Judging from the download stat, not many people using it.

rjprins• 16 years ago

Actually this is a feature I was missing. I like your implementation, thanks!!

silentbicycle2• 16 years ago

Emacs already comes with functions for that.

pop-global-mark (C-x C-SPC) moves you around a global mark stack, and C-u set-mark-command (C-u C-SPC) does this locally in a buffer. (I use this hundreds of times a day.)

The bookmark package (go to "Bookmarks" in the Emacs info pages) give you persistent bookmarks, with a fairly nice interface.

I've written stuff in elisp only to find that it already existed in Emacs, too. Now, I usually check http://emacswiki.org first.

ww5202• 16 years ago

I had looked at global mark (pop-global-mark), local mark, and Bookmark but i didn't like their behaviors.

Global mark (or local mark) doesn't work on buffers that have been killed. When I jump back to a quick bookmark, I want its file loaded back into memory if its buffer has been killed.

Global mark doesn't work consistently. It seems to only remember the last mark set in a buffer, so it has an one mark per buffer behavior. The flow seems to use global mark to jump back to a buffer, then use local marks to jump to different points in the buffer. I want just one quick bookmark system, no global or local distinction, to remember multiple points in a buffer and multiple buffers.

Mark is kind of overloaded for different purposes. Its primary use is for marking regions (for copy/cut/etc). I turn on transient-mark-mode to better highlight regions. Whenever I made a mark for quick bookmarking, the region is highlighted and have to be canceled; it's very annoying.

The Bookmark package requires assigning a name for each bookmark, entering its name to jump back to the bookmark, and deleting the name when it's not needed. It is good for permanent bookmarks but very cumbersome for quick bookmarking. I just want to set anonymous quick bookmarks and jump back to them quickly. I don't want to manage the names.

The good thing about Emacs is that if you don't like the way things are working, you can roll your own. So I did.

riso• 16 years ago

I just built a site for the CrossFit gym that I go to that allows members to track the results, flag various milestones, make easy comparison to previous workouts and comment on other people's results.

They initially loved it, but when they found out it couldn't be integrated into their Wordpress blog, they dismissed the completed project. So I guess the reason for its failure was lack of input.

The project didn't take that long to create and was made to be more of an advertising tool for my company.

http://crossfitter.ca (although you can't see that much unless you belong to a signed up gym)

fragmede• 16 years ago

quietyoutube.com

There just isn't much to it. I'll add a bookmarklet when I get around to it.

boyter2• 16 years ago

Hmmm feature... not really.

I did have a website that pulled multiple RSS feeds (thousands) and then parsed each entry matching it to others that it had seen before. It could then show you what was popular at any moment on the web, with the ability to see what the article was linked to, and what they were linked to. It showed some interesting things like how a website was effected by something happening on the world stage.

The idea was you could find what was hot on the web at any one time. Nobody really showed any interest in it though.

Reason... I didnt want to pony up the money to put a live version on the web due to not knowing how the producers of the RSS feeds would fee. So there was never anything more then a demo concept.

dotBen• 16 years ago

not knowing how the producers of the RSS feeds would fee

If I understand what you are saying then I don't think there would be any. It sounds like a neat project, where can we take a look?

boyter2• 16 years ago

*feel.

Should be how they would feel about it.

Its somewhat discontinued. I may spin it up again someday, as everything is there minus the database with data. If I ever do, I will post it on HN for people to have a look.

EDIT - I will have a go at spinning it up tonight actually. It should be pretty easy to do in theory.

timae• 16 years ago

http://wunbar.com

Quick and simple to make, thought I could make some money on referral fees, but went nowhere.

Failure, I suppose: browsers can do the same thing, with a little setup; and, more importantly, people seem to have a preference to navigate to each of these sites and search them directly.

idoh3• 16 years ago

I like this site. I feel that having to type in the prefixes might be a blocker for the normal crowd. Have you tried some different UIs to make picking the service happen?

edo• 16 years ago

http://spudu.com is the same app with a different UI

duck• 16 years ago

I like that idea and use DDG's bang feature all the time.

thegyppo2• 16 years ago

Have you thought about integrating these similar features into Chrome via a plugin?

Would be fairly good to be able to search Wikipedia by typing w: in the URL bar.

davidalln• 16 years ago

You can already do this in Chrome. For example, I hit ' to search Wikipedia and hit ; to I'm Feeling Lucky Google.

Preferences -> Basics -> Manage (Next to Default Search)

Groxx2• 16 years ago

I set something like this up myself with a Safari plugin. One thing I learned rather quickly:

nobody searches with capital letters, so hitting the shift key to make a ":" is a pretty big cost. Just use "g <search>", and detect prefixes you know; it's much faster and less awkward to use.

arvinjoar• 16 years ago

Parang? http://hannesp.se/parang/ The guy who wrote it mentored me when I was a programming noob.

emilsedgh• 16 years ago

Konqueror has this feature since ages. gg:foo for searching foo in google ggi for google images and much more, like imdb, even php for searching in php docs. And thats the most awesome feature ever.

wakeless• 16 years ago

I built a Twitter client that filters out everything in your feed except for Tweets including urls or photos. It's pretty good way of just finding the interesting stuff in your Twitter feed.

http://blurl.me

rythie• 16 years ago

I've got that as a feature in friendbinder and no one uses it.

DaveChild3• 16 years ago

That's rather good. I (long ago in the dark ages of the 90s) built something very similar to twitter and included the ability to see just URLs from posts. I wish they'd do the same thing.

edash• 16 years ago

Man, I wish something existed that did the opposite.

Only show me Tweets that don't include:

Photos URLs RTs Hash Tags

robryan• 16 years ago

Pulling live ebay auctions to match with regular price comparison. It seems that the most effective way to improve conversions on a price comparison site seems to be just to put relevant links to merchant sites front and centre on the landing page, the majority of people coming from Google don't care what fancy value add features you have created.

Freelance work btw, I don't run a affiliate marketing site myself.

kvogt• 16 years ago

http://www.thisistheonlyone.com

Made a site in college to sell a T-shirt for $1,000,000. Didn't work. But I did make $40 off an MIT professor who bet me I wouldn't try it.

tamarindo• 16 years ago

Maybe it didn't work because your site doesn't have any way to process payments? I wonder if Paypal imposes a per-transaction upper limit.

michaelw• 16 years ago

CSS Expressions. Aka Dynamic Properties.

Recently deprecated http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537634(VS.85).aspx

Ironically now showing up in other browsers own extensions.

Reasons for failure:

* distrust of Microsoft inventions in the browser

* incomplete implementation strategy based on javascript instead of custom expression parser

* security issues because of using javascript instead of a custom expression parser

flomo• 16 years ago

FWIW, these were used quite a bit back in the dark-ages.

Always thought of them as a halfway point between pure CSS and Netscape's idea of implementing stylesheets in Javascript.

superk3• 16 years ago

Add to the failure list:

* Terrible performance - practically first rule for optimizing page rendering is "don't use CSS expressions"

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rendering.html http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/07/high_perfor...

* Only work on IE natch.

So, you have Javascript which was better performance and worked everywhere.

I think it's a little misleading to say it's the best feature no one ever used. CSS expressions were re-born as hardware-accelerated CSS3 transitions - with a much better, more focused implementation, and are pretty popular these days - especially for mobile.

barmstrong• 16 years ago

http://BuyersVote.com

Chicken/egg problem with reaching critical mass. My plan was/is to grow it organically with long tail keywords once Google starts indexing all the pages. But they haven't done that yet because the site doesn't have enough incoming links to warrant indexing 1000 pages (another chicken/egg problem :)

cloudkj2• 16 years ago

Wow, it's as if I wrote those few sentences :) I totally feel you on the chicken/egg problem. It's definitely a big hurdle for any kind of social web app these days.

code_duck2• 16 years ago

We spent months on an in depth analytics tool for our users.

Most of them don't have an idea what the data means. It's over their heads, so we missed the mark audience wise.

bbwharris• 16 years ago

I've encountered this numerous times with charting data for others. I find a great top level view of some key data, but it flies over their head and it never gets used.

This is probably our failure, not theirs. We can't expect our audiences to understand something the way we understand it.

code_duck2• 16 years ago

Definitely, the key is to see things the way the users do, and provide only what they think they want to know. Seems like I'm stating the obvious, but doing the opposite is easier than it seems.

ulrich• 16 years ago

The multiplayer mode of my Android game "Laska". There are just not enough active players to make it work.

But I like the feature because its based on AppEngine and XMPP, so it doesn't have any costs and will probably be available forever. (forever on the internet means sth. like 2-5 years)

intranation• 16 years ago

At the risk of being contrary to the spirit of the thread: if no one uses it it's probably not a very good feature.

viggity• 16 years ago

I'm not so sure, marketing has a lot to do with how many people use a product/feature

imp• 16 years ago

Exactly. The saying is "make something people want," not "make something you think is cool."

rak19• 16 years ago

http://www.vidteq.com . We are a self funded startup. Usability is bad and performance issuses. How can we drag more people to use this application?

retube2• 16 years ago

you seem to have a big team. How did you manage to get so many people to all fund themselves?

PlanetFunk2• 16 years ago

I wrote a jetpack app the allows you to toggle the Search header, Left Column, and Footer elements on/off in iGoogle.

http://jetpackgallery.mozillalabs.com/jetpacks/55

I'd say it didn't take off because it requires the user to have firefox, install jetpack, use igoogle, and be annoyed by all that wasted space etc :)

I wouldn't say it failed. I use it at work and home, and I love it :)

PlanetFunk2• 16 years ago

I wrote a jetpack app the allows you to toggle the Search header, Left Column, and Footer elements on/off in iGoogle.

http://jetpackgallery.mozillalabs.com/jetpacks/55

I'd say it didn't take off because it requires the user to have firefox, install jetpack, use igoogle, and be annoyed by all that wasted space etc :)

I wouldn't say it failed. I use it at work and home, and I love it :)

cloudkj2• 16 years ago

I wrote a couple browser extensions for Amazon Gold Box: http://webslices.s3.amazonaws.com/goldbox.html (IE 8) and https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/abgkkmmoanpopajo... (Chrome)

I actually got the web slice accepted into the IE addons gallery (http://www.ieaddons.com) after waiting a couple months for approval. Then I made a small revision to the entry, and for some reason that made it go back into the "pending approval" queue. I sent several emails to the website support contact and got no answers. Months later, Amazon came out with their own extension. I finally got a response from a Microsoft rep after escalating with a friend, and they told me about how my extension can't be posted due to a partnership agreement. Pretty lame.

DaveChild3• 16 years ago

The "Donate money to me" button.

jbm• 16 years ago

I built a multiuser blog for a site with two million plus users (soundpedia.com). I worked hard to make it scalable; making it static, easy sync with new servers in the cluster, etc... Themeable too. It was pretty sweet for the time frame.

Turns out we had an audience whose blogs were composed of copying lyrics and changing colours. You can guess not many really used it.

Oh well. SP went out of business a while after so I never had a chance to do what the audience really wanted (a like button)

jrussbowman• 16 years ago

It's a tie for me.

1. The entire http://www.choip.me website, I built it because I was sick of seeing ads for twitter scams on other tweet longer sites, so I just threw together a Twitter + Disqus mashup on appengine to do the same thing, and provide a better way to take discussions "offline" on Twitter. Not bad for basically a weekend project I think.

2. The custom search portals on www.unscatter.com. Of course I'm still working on it, the interface for creating them is very rough. But the functionality is there. A couple examples of what can be done with it are the Devsearch - http://www.unscatter.com/search/unscatter/devsearch/ and Conservation Search - http://www.unscatter.com/search/unscatter/conservationsearch...

andrewtj• 16 years ago

I'm not sure this is the "best feature" that no one uses, but it is one that I've always thought some crafty hacker could do something cool with.

BonjourFoxy[1] adds Bonjour support to Firefox and is predominately used to find websites advertised by printers, network cameras and so on, but it can also be used by other extensions to advertise and discover network services.

Currently the only extension I'm aware of that makes use of this is iGiro[2] which combined with an iPhone app let's you scan bill numbers straight into Firefox's text field.

Now admittedly I haven't got any killer P2P extensions in mind, but surely some other folks out there do —?

[1] http://www.bonjourfoxy.net/

[2] http://igiroapp.se/

andybak• 16 years ago

http://code.google.com/p/django-linkcheck/

The take-up is probably limited by the fact that my documentation is erring towards the minimal.

That and the erroneous dependencies I forgot to remove until last week. :)

lkozma• 16 years ago

The site

http://www.soundsabitlike.com

probably it's not visible enough on Google or it's just me who finds song similarities interesting :)

michaelcampbell• 16 years ago

You're certainly not the only one; Pandora.com is based on that very premise.

carnevalem• 16 years ago

I'm really enjoying this site. You should improve the permalink feature though. I want to share some of these comparisons with friends, but its not very easy right now.

anoopengineer• 16 years ago

This one: http://www.karminator.com/

I thought this would be a competitor for http://www.fmylife.com/

Not just any feature, the entire site is something that none uses

feint• 16 years ago

our app allows users to interact (create reminders via natural language) through email. I added in a feature/easter egg that lets the user start any email with @answer, followed by a question. Instead of reminder being added to our system, they are sent back the answer to the question. Uses natural language recognition

JangoSteve• 16 years ago

On http://www.ratemystudentrental.com, it was Watch Lists. If there was no available rental property that matched what you searched for, you could just hit a button to "create Watch List" and RMSR would notify you when a rental that met your criteria was added to the site or became available. Everyone thought this sounded like a "great idea" for the week or so it took me to build. Now 2 years later, exactly 2 people have ever used it.

Why did it go unused (I wouldn't say it totally failed)? The biggest reason is probably because no one wants to use your site as much as you want them to. If they couldn't find what they wanted on my site right away, why would they stick around when they could just go look elsewhere?

That's why I ended up building the "Around the Web" feature, where if a rental couldn't be found on RMSR, it will aggregate and map properties from other sites (around the web). This feature was mildly more successful.

ecaron• 16 years ago

I called it WorkSearch: http://www.linkup.com/worksearch/

Basically it is a timer for jobseekers that runs in the background, to push them to spend a longer amount of time hunting for a job than they normally would (even if it isn't on our site). People have always known that the biggest difficulty with job-hunting is spending enough time on it, but it is really demonstrated by the this 2009 NYTimes interactive graphic: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/31/business/20080...

Despite some bloggers writing about it (http://helpmegethired.wordpress.com/2009/06/), it never took off. I'd say the failure came from the execution. It needed to be dead-simple to turn on (w/o requiring an account), and always present yet unintrusive. Maybe the next version...

vivekrj• 16 years ago

Supported the entire 3GPP2-A10/A11 protocol for my product called Unsniff based on one customer's strong demand. One day my customer contact mysteriously disappeared and no one has used this feature ever since. That hurt.

Lesson learnt !

superk3• 16 years ago

http://www.travelatlas.org/

Based on the terribly original idea of writing about your travel experiences. A couple good features (imo):

- Inherent credibility. I figured if you ask someone you meet on the street where's a good place to eat or stay - being a complete stranger - the chance of them giving you good information is about the same as flipping a coin: 50-50. So everyone starts with 50% credibility. As you write reviews and people are in agreement (via like/don't like or comments) your credibility goes up (influenced of course by the credibility of the commentor).

- Built in messaging and chat. Added some "bots" to make it look like there were actually more users at one point. The idea was to implement a parser so that you could ask someone in chat: "where's a cheap place to stay in guam?" the app would parse the query and a bot could answer with the highest rated hostel in that location for example.

- Parse search terms with ability to search by category. So if you search for "a bed to crash on" while you're in manhattan, the app prompts if you'd like to search the "lodging" category.

Reason for failure:

- Other people did it better (tripadvisor, virtual tourist, etc)

- SHOCKWAVE (although this was 2005)

AmberShah2• 16 years ago

http://bettersoftwareprocess.com/

I always wanted a site like this to discuss software process things without the hardcore evangelists using buzzwords. It didn't take too long to throw this up so it wasn't a massive waste but I actually thought it would start growing once I shared it with my developer/agile network. Not much interest, apparently. I'll probably have to kill it soon so it doesn't sit there mocking me.

Sinikway• 16 years ago

I built a social networking site by myself with real time chat, messaging, photo sharing, music sharing, users can post wall messages, display their public timeline tweets, create friends list. I think the reason it didn't take off is the lack of money in advertisement. I tried Google adwords but the most I spent is 50 bucks and kind of short of it. The site is http://www.jamafriend.com

Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

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