
Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits? - cousin_it
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.
======
epi0Bauqu
<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.

~~~
neetij
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?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
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.

------
aristus
<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.

~~~
anotherjesse
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.

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

------
markbao
<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. :/

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

~~~
SwellJoe
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.

~~~
cglee
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".

~~~
SwellJoe
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.

------
mosburger
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. :)

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

~~~
jward
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

------
diego
<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_it
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.

~~~
diego
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.

~~~
henning
Have you looked at work done on keyword extraction from academic literature?

<http://www.nzdl.org/Kea/>

It's simple and accurate.

~~~
diego
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.

~~~
vulpes
When is the API coming? I can see us using this quite a bit.

~~~
diego
The API is already available although we haven't announced it. There is a
WordPress plugin that uses it, called TagMahal.

Please contact us if you'd like to use the API, if you need to do up to 5k
queries per day or so it shouldn't have much of an impact on our server.

~~~
Corrado
I would like to see a Blogspot plug-in too! I just tried it on my latest post
and it worked much better than I did. :)

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

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

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

~~~
rochers
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.

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

------
paraschopra
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?

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

------
naich
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>

~~~
epi0Bauqu
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.

------
kjell
<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.

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

------
pokerup
<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.

------
dmnd
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.

------
cwisecarver
<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.

------
sfalbo
<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?

------
swhnorton
<http://maps.staticrooster.com/>

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

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

------
edawerd
<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.

------
Diogenes
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.

------
japanoid
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!!

------
mosburger
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
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.

~~~
mosburger
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. :/

------
thinkcomp
<http://www.thinkcomputer.com/software/exponent>

Sure beats QuickBooks.

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

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

------
chriszf
<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.

------
mudge
<http://newsconomy.com/> Social bookmarking and news website.

------
hariskh
Simple fun site to review companies.

<http://www.pingmycompany.com>

------
breily
<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.

------
josefresco
<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 :(

------
NewWorldOrder
<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.

------
tlrobinson
<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.

------
res2
<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!

------
deepfall
<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.

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

------
kynikos
<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.

------
brlewis
<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.

------
Ilia
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?

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

------
russw
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

------
tpimental
<http://www.feedcrush.com>

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

------
jdavid
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.

------
apgwoz
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.

~~~
mosburger
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!

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

------
nazgulnarsil
yeah, my blog is awesome :p

------
fresh
digg.com

------
localdataplace
<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.

~~~
calvin
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.

------
0x28aa1f185a6b4
duthel's comment is not spam.

