Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=187977

by cousin_it • 18 years ago

103 120 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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.

aristus3• 18 years ago

http://dowser.sf.net

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.

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

I guess nowadays such things are made as Firefox extensions, e.g. Breadcrumbs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2954 .

aristus3• 18 years ago

Yep. When the Slogger plugin came out I decided Dowser's time had come & gone.

anotherjesse• 18 years ago

Dowser is/was amazing. When I was at Flock I would always use it as the example of what we should be doing with search in the browser.

Mozilla's start page with the google box is nice but nothing compared to dowser.

aristus3• 18 years ago

That's... actually very cool and gratifying to hear. Thank you. :)

markbao3• 18 years ago

http://cadmium.avecora.com/

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. :/

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

Great sense of web design on all your sites, and being 15 is pretty impressive too :-)

jbenz• 18 years ago

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.

andreyf2• 18 years ago

Random curiosity: did you change your name from Steve to Mark? If it isn't personal, mind sharing why?

SwellJoe5• 18 years ago

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.

markbao3• 18 years ago

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.

It is, however, my legally recognized name.

SwellJoe5• 18 years ago

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.

m0nty• 18 years ago

'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.

sdurkin• 18 years ago

Wow, very nice.

If you're not in stealth mode, may I ask what is your current venture?

agentbleu2• 18 years ago

now if i was an investor, i would buy in.

diego4• 18 years ago

http://tagger.flaptor.com - automatically suggests tags for blog posts or articles.

It's still mostly a demo, we are improving it very slowly because most of our resources are going into other projects.

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

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.

diego4• 18 years ago

Yes, it doesn't know when to shut up. It tends to work better with longer articles, we usually test it with content from Google News.

visakhcr• 18 years ago

anyway, http://zemanta.com is doing a good job in this area...

art_wells• 18 years ago

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.

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

I love your wording: "Keep This Shrine Ad Free" :-)

localdataplace• 18 years ago

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.

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

We used to think Google Maps KML search would dominate this area. Now I'm not so sure.

calvin• 18 years ago

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.

paulhart• 18 years ago

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.

thinkcomp3• 18 years ago

http://www.thinkcomputer.com/software/exponent

Sure beats QuickBooks.

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

Why did this fail? Also, "Inventors of The Facebook"?

thinkcomp3• 18 years ago

Mostly because people don't know about it I think. And yes, that would be true.

unalone• 18 years ago

"The Facebook" was the original name of the site. thefacebook.com still links to it, actually.

vlad• 18 years ago

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.

thinkcomp3• 18 years ago

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.

jward2• 18 years ago

http://www.imageboard.net/top/

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 ;)

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

That's a great idea, and a great domain name. You didn't go forward?

jward2• 18 years ago

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.

Any suggestions would be appreciated :D

jfarmer• 18 years ago

Lots of, uh, phalluses.

staticshock2• 18 years ago

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.

technoguyrob• 18 years ago

http://www.imageboard.net/accounts/login/

NO TEXT, HUH?

Just kidding, that's pretty cool. :)

staticshock2• 18 years ago

animation might be an interesting direction to go in.

great concept, i'm glad some crowd picked it up. seems like something 4chan or ytmnd would dig.

edawerd• 18 years ago

http://www.mygrub.net

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.

STHayden• 18 years ago

http://www.flugpo.com

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.

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

The world needs an antisocial network, where each user is explicitly supposed to swindle others.

coglethorpe• 18 years ago

I've used this site and I like it.

tonystubblebine• 18 years ago

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.

The Paul Graham tag: http://www.iheartquotes.com/tags/paul_graham

On Twitter http://www.twitter.com/iheartquotes

In my .bash_profile curl -m 3 http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

This site makes me happy too! Thanks for sharing :-)

daleharvey• 18 years ago

Nothing world changing, but the pastebin I wrote recently, I find it pretty handy for sharing js snippets

http://paste.arandomurl.com/

it shows the page rendered above in a frame below, you can test snippets of javascript / css in it, processing js works as well

http://paste.arandomurl.com/4826dda37f28b

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

I once did the same for ActionScript. And of course this stuff works best for visually-oriented languages, like CFDG: http://korsh.com/cfdg/

chriszf• 18 years ago

http://lifeshelf.net

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.

epi0Bauqu5• 18 years ago

http://watrcoolr.us

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.

mosburger5• 18 years ago

This site is very, very cool. I really appreciate super-minimalistic UI's like this. I've bookmarked it. :)

jmackinn• 18 years ago

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.

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

That's one great UI, thanks for sharing!

bbgm• 18 years ago

We should start a movement for watrcooler. Love the design, especially the keyboard nav

epi0Bauqu5• 18 years ago

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.

neetij• 18 years ago

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.

Question, why load a new page for each story?

epi0Bauqu5• 18 years ago

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.

Ilia• 18 years ago

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?

brlewis• 18 years ago

http://brl.codesimply.net/

Inexplicably, when you ask people to name an easy-to-learn language that's designed for web/database applications, they still say PHP.

breily• 18 years ago

http://search.brianreily.com - lets you search multiple sites from one bar.

Its been a work in progress for a long time (thus why its a subdomain), and haven't had a chance to do much with it.

So I guess it hasn't _failed_, but it hasn't succeeded.

rochers3• 18 years ago

http://www.thephotostream.com could change the way people consume their daily web.

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

Nice! Make it scroll scroll scroll as people add new stories.

rochers3• 18 years ago

Yeah one of the things I am working on is ways to do two things:

1) See "more" than the 28 newest on the homepage.

AND

2) See when people click / add stories to the stream.

rochers3• 18 years ago

Hey Cousin,

I made it scroll :-)

Scott

agentbleu2• 18 years ago

I think some of these projects are better than whats out there. This one is pretty interesting IMO.

apgwoz2• 18 years ago

I meant to link this on my photography blog when I saw it a while back. Did it now instead: http://www.photub.com/2008/May/13/photo-stream/

Fuca• 18 years ago

cool site

apgwoz2• 18 years ago

maybe it wouldn't change the world, but if you're into reading multiple local papers "popurls style" http://www.newshoured.com/ might be a friend.

mosburger5• 18 years ago

Ha... I was thinking about making the exact same thing! I was going to target it for mobile audiences. Yours seems to work pretty well!

adammichaelc• 18 years ago

Wow! This is so cool. Good job. Great format.

kjell• 18 years ago

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.

mosburger5• 18 years ago

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. :)

watmough• 18 years ago

That's really pretty cool. However, it seems like it would be hard to hold the attention of people who don't like to scroll down.

I guess that's one of my favorite things about HN. Loads fast and only need to scroll on the most commented articles.

mosburger5• 18 years ago

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. :/

mosburger5• 18 years ago

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. :)

Diogenes• 18 years ago

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.

http://www.famoushotdish.com

And yes, this was before we had even heard of alltop. Our first version was in October 07.

wastedbrains• 18 years ago

http://seekler.com

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.

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

It's a shame - the idea is quite nice. Could use a simpler UI.

nazgulnarsil• 18 years ago

yeah, my blog is awesome :p

dmnd• 18 years ago

Perhaps not quite grandiose or revolutionary enough to meet the description at the top of this page, but here's my dead-in-the-water project:

http://ploya.com

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.

mudge• 18 years ago

http://newsconomy.com/ Social bookmarking and news website.

deepfall• 18 years ago

http://www.answermonk.com

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.

fresh• 18 years ago

digg.com

pokerup• 18 years ago

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.

sonink• 18 years ago

http://www.merawaala.com create,share and embed comparisons .. kind of like a youtube for comparisons

hariskh• 18 years ago

Simple fun site to review companies.

http://www.pingmycompany.com

naich• 18 years ago

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://www.maggenhoof.co.uk/mortgage

epi0Bauqu5• 18 years ago

Thanks! I was looking for something like this the other day.

It would be better (for me that is) if you included some refinance options, i.e. compare your current mortgage to your refinance options.

vpweb• 18 years ago

Ya, but I forgot the link since I haven't visited it in a while. :)

jdavid• 18 years ago

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.

josefresco• 18 years ago

http://www.OtherWeather.com

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 :(

tpimental• 18 years ago

http://www.feedcrush.com

A mashup of 1 college radio station's play data with much larger ambitions...

paraschopra• 18 years ago

Never had the resources to launch an advertising network (http://precimark.com), an independent music platform (http://kroomsa.com), a startup aggregator (http://startuplogic.com) from the scratch and without a marketing budget.

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?

0x28aa1f185a6b4• 18 years ago

duthel's comment is not spam.

swhnorton• 18 years ago

http://maps.staticrooster.com/

GPS overlay data on maps with geosynced photos. Like personal Google maps w/ panoramio.

cousin_it15• 18 years ago

Hey, that's a great way to show photos on the map! Why didn't I think about that?

russw• 18 years ago

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

japanoid• 18 years ago

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!!

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

http://toobs.tlrobinson.net - crime maps and reports for USC / Los Angeles/

To be fair, it was built in 24 hours for a programming contest two years ago, and hasn't been touched since.

sfalbo• 18 years ago

http://MyHouseResearch.com

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?

NewWorldOrder• 18 years ago

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.

cwisecarver• 18 years ago

http://www.jihadonyou.com

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.

kynikos• 18 years ago

http://www.thecollegeblognetwork.com

not sure if it I'd consider it a failure, but definitely has not seen the organic growth that we initially expected.

res2• 18 years ago

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!

Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?

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