
Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses? - mcgyver
Also curious to know the probable reasons for the failure.
======
michaelw
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
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.

------
frossie
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.

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

<http://bigbooksearch.com/>

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

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

~~~
chaosmachine
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?

~~~
idoh
To make it indexable you need users to enter in text. Maybe you could have a
mini wiki above the search results, where users describe the search they are
trying to do or what the search means, or can annotate the search. With your
current UI this would be really hard. I feel like the UI is cool on first
blush but sort of limits your options as far as experimentation goes.

Just brainstorming here:

\- maybe the hook could be: "judge books by their covers"

\- the layout is pretty slick but constrains what you can do with the site.
Have you considered scrolling down? It could be a differentiator though (your
current layout that is).

\- When you mouse over a book, have some type of overlay function: star the
book, "have you read this book? what did you think?" (leave a comment), share
on twitter / facebook (a necessary evil perhaps)

\- when you click on a cover, it lightboxes in and has the things listed above

\- make it like a reddit, but for covers

\- people who searched for x also searched for y

~~~
chaosmachine
I actually built another site around most of those ideas you just mentioned
(but changed the idea to films, as I found they worked better):

<http://filmvsfilm.com/>

It's basically all user-generated-content, and it actually does rank on Google
for a few things, but it's the wrong kind of traffic: People aren't in buying
mode, very few visitors actually click through to Amazon and buy something.

~~~
maushu
Try changing the "Buy at Amazon" to "See it at Amazon", also show who is
winning.

These are basically A/B tests.

------
cloudkj
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...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/abgkkmmoanpopajomeejifhhdgpanndd)
(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.

------
kvogt
<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
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.

------
ww520
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.

~~~
silentbicycle
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.

~~~
ww520
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.

~~~
silentbicycle
Indeed. I'm no stranger to re-implementing something because no existing
version was quite what I wanted, either. On rereading, my post didn't really
come across like I intended.

Then again, even when implementing something that (it turns out) already
exists, solving the problems that come up along the way almost always teaches
one something.

And with Emacs extensions, even if you're the only one who finds it useful,
_it's still useful_. :)

------
andrewtj
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/>

------
jbm
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)

------
superk
<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)

------
ecaron
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...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/31/business/20080801-metrics-
graphic.html)

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...

------
JangoSteve
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.

------
timae
<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.

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

~~~
Groxx
Same functionality, but I did it with SafariStand. Given how little I used
Stand's other features, this probably could've been better :)

------
jaxn
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
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! :)

------
carbocation
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
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.

~~~
carbocation
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.

------
ulrich
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)

------
boyter
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
_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?

~~~
boyter
*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.

------
barmstrong
<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 :)

~~~
cloudkj
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.

------
jrussbowman
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...](http://www.unscatter.com/search/unscatter/conservationsearch/)

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

------
riso
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)

------
AmberShah
<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
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>

------
mbenjaminsmith
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).

------
PlanetFunk
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 :)

------
robryan
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.

------
d0m
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".

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

------
andybak
<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. :)

------
anoopengineer
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

------
wakeless
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>

~~~
DaveChild
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.

------
DaveChild
The "Donate money to me" button.

------
vivekrj
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 !

------
rak19
<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?

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

------
lkozma
The site

<http://www.soundsabitlike.com>

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

~~~
carnevalem
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.

------
code_duck
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
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_duck
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.

------
feint
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

------
PlanetFunk
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 :)

------
fragmede
quietyoutube.com

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

