

Ask HN: Side Projects Gone Deadpooled - SomeoneAtHN

As eps pointed out in the previous thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772224) about side projects gone big, there were also an enormous amount of side projects that just went dead. I am sure many of HNers are curious to hear and learn from them.<p>So feel free to list what the project is, how did you come up with the idea, and of course, when and how did it go deadpooled.
======
jazzychad
Here are mine (between 2006 and 2010):

(Some of these are offline because they are/were hosted on my personal
computer which is currently on a moving truck)

Afk247 - <http://afk247.com/> \- an away message ranking site where people
could vote on their favorite away messages submitted by users. This was back
when AIM was my main mode of communication at school. Was going to make money
with AdSense. Never really took off, but I did get an article in the school
newspaper about it!

MadStatter - <http://madstatter.com/> \- Baseball stats site. I'm a huge
baseball fan and love all those weird stats that go along with it. This site
had a couple of (imho) cool interfaces to display interesting stats. Tried
using AdSense but didn't make much.

SecureShirts - <http://secureshirts.com/> \- I wanted to learn how to
screenprint my own t-shirts, so I bought all the equipment and learned how. I
decided to print my own line of nerdy shirts and sell them online. I sold a
few, but never got really big.

TweetShirts - <http://tweetshirts.com/> \- Twitter themed t-shirts. Made a
tiny profit, but had a lot of leftover inventory when I decided to kill it.

Sideways Shirts - <http://sidewaysshirts.com/> \- In addition to my own nerdy
shirts, I did custom screenprinting for events/groups/etc. I did it in my
spare time, but became profitable and it was a lot of fun. This covered the
cost of printing my inventory for SecureShirts and TweetShirts.

I had to deadpool all of the shirt printing businesses when we decided to move
to CA after launching Notifo during YC. We left our townhouse in NC and
relocated to a tiny apartment in SF which didn't have room for any of the
equipment. I'm sad to let that go, but it was very time consuming and labor
intensive. I'm glad for the learning experience though.

Flixpulse - <http://flixpulse.com/> \- This was the first Twitter Movie Review
site that I know of. All of these new studies coming out about doing sentiment
analysis in tweets all came along after Flixpulse had been out for a while. I
did Bayesian analysis on a manually-trained corpus of movie-review tweets, and
then it became pretty well self-learning after that. It was fun but eventually
the old little computer that hosted it (900MHz gateway that was forever old)
finally ran out of RAM to hold the Bayesian filter data. Oh well. Tried doing
affiliate movie ticket sales through Fandango and affiliate movie poster
sales, but nothing really came of it.

TheRentMap - <http://therentmap.com/> \- Apartment listings on a Google Map
interface which led to affiliate apartment programs. Not quite dead yet, but
it would take significant effort to get it to a point where it really makes
any money.

There are a couple others on the verge of the deadpool, but some that I think
might make fun side-projects for a while longer.

Mainly I do all these projects as learning exercises. Each one has something
new to it that I had never done before, so after a while I have an arsenal of
knowledge to throw at bigger, more complicated projects.

I think Notifo will be taking up most of my time for the near-future, and one
I am desperately going to keep from the deadpool :)

~~~
r11t
Notifo is awesome! I have been using it for some toy projects like:
<http://github.com/himanshuc/macanator>. Also, <http://push.ly> works great
with notifo for twitter notifications. Overall, I am a satisfied user and
think you will most definitely be away from the deadpool.

------
jacquesm
I've killed off a fair number of them over the years, mostly because I feel
that if someone doesn't develop any traction at all I might as well pull the
plug on it. Some were just ways to try out some new technology (ok, make that
'excuses', not 'ways'), others were done purely for fun.

If something did develop traction I would support it for years and years even
if it ended up having very few members (livelog was one of those).

I find it difficult to kill off projects that have a few dedicated users,
usually I contact them to find a way in which I can let the project go away
without hurting their feelings.

Right now the biggest one that is on my 'deadpooled' list is the free drupal
hosting site that I started a few years ago. At some point it had a few
thousand domains on it, right now I think we're down to below 50, and every
month one or two make the move to another hosting provider. Another three
years and I can kill it.

Websites are like children, five minutes of work to launch them and you must
support them the rest of your life ;)

------
pzxc
Here's mine:

# InstantFileHosting - Simple one page site that allows you to instantly
upload any file and get a public URL for it, without requiring registration or
anything else that takes unnecessary time or effort. Project abandoned because
many other sites do this, they are pretty well known or easy to find, the app
consumed a lot of bandwidth, and was a popular target for malware.

# InstantSendMail - Simple one page site that allows you to send an e-mail
instantly and quickly. Figured it would be handy when you need to send
yourself a note but don't want to take the time to login to your webmail.
Abandoned because even with restrictions it would be as handy for spammers as
it would for real users, and because of the hassles of running an email server
or the responsibility of making sure someone else's wasn't abused.

# WebCommandPrompt - This was a crazy idea to provide a command prompt
interface to the web. It would have eventually an extensive list of command
for all sorts of actions you might like to perform on the internet, such as
pinging, running trace-routes, querying DNS information, sending quick emails,
etc. Similar to how desktop application launchers SlickRun, Find and Run
Robot, and Enso work but for the internet. Abandoned because it would be hard
to leverage (each command would require its own design and development), and
it seemed kind of a step backwards to build a text rather than graphical
interface for the internet even if it increased usability.

# BuriedRiches - An ecommerce site for my own personal use to list stuff I was
trying to sell during my eBay days, so that I could market outside of ebay and
sell things for longer periods without paying for recurring auctions.
Abandoned when I abandoned eBay, because it involved too much work that could
not be automated, like taking pictures, shipping, etc.

# PicVersus - A picture rating site, based mostly around "cute" pictures of
puppies, kittens, etc where visitors were presented with 2 pictures and asked
to choose which was best. Similar to HotOrNot but for cute or funny pictures.
Abandoned because it was too easy to create and had too much competition with
no competitive advantage.

# IdentifyRE - A real estate analysis webapp, for RE investors. Input relevant
information about properties you are considering, like price, square footage,
tax and insurance amounts, market rents, etc and it calculates and displays
estimated cashflow of those properties so you can more easily determine which
are most likely to be profitable. Abandoned because of the subjective nature
of the analysis and the highly specific market for this kind of application
made marketing difficult.

# WealthBarons - An online browser-based game based on real estate, where you
can buy virtual property, develop it, and accumulate wealth as you compete
with other players to build the largest real estate empire. Never really got
off the ground, as other projects took priority and games are very time- and
resource-intensive to build.

# ApocRPG - An online browser-based RPG game. I'm a huge fan of RPGs and I
spent a couple of solid years building my own from the ground up, including 2D
graphics. Had some very innovative gameplay mechanics such as a choose-your-
own-adventure style scenario system, automatic character alignment adjustment
(good/evil) based on player actions, etc. Lasted a long time and I was very
proud of it, but eventually abandoned as I moved onto other projects.

# ForumGlance - A tool for people who read web forums a lot, where you can
specify the URL of the forums you want to monitor, and it would extract links
to the most recent threads and show you on a single page the most recent posts
of all your favorite forums. Abandoned because it was too dependent on a wide
variety of constantly changing forum software, causing frequent bugs and
requiring constant updates.

~~~
decadentcactus
ForumGlance: Had a similar idea just the other day, although mine was mostly
to watch to buy some cheap things/bid on auctions etc. Probably since I'd
handpick the forums it'd be easier to tailor the parser though.

------
zaidf
Wow.

MIDDLE SCHOOL

HelpersSeekers.com - would have been yahoo answers! like site. Somehow never
launched. Spent months developing.

HIGH SCHOOL

CricketFreak.com - a cricket news portal. Somehow never launched. Spent months
developing.

trackmail(sp?).com - send email through it and get a notification when it's
read(a personal omg moment)

COLLEGE

ChupChaap.com Classifieds site for India.

TextbookDaddy.com - textbook exchange site. launched. shut down. within few
days

 _way too cool domain I need to re-register_.com woot for young women.
developed for weeks. shut down in couple days after launch

Hollr.org - CL-like site. Never launched. Good call!

ClassHunt.com - let students at my uni get a txt soon as a seat opened up in a
class

 _became a huge hit on campus, over 50% of freshman signed up, had to shut
down after uni's course registration moved to peoplesoft which made it
impossible to parse latest class data

Good news: I pivoted to another product in same market which is now my start-
up_

~~~
aasarava
Why shut down so many products within a few days after launch? Doesn't seem
like enough time to test traction.

~~~
zaidf
Yeah, single biggest lesson learned. Since, my ideas have had a lot more time
dedicated to it, more iterations(vs. NONE) and a lot more traction to show.

------
tectonic
I'll bite.

I've done a lot of side projects. True to what people have said in here, most
of them still exist, but get no attention from me or anyone else. Some I have
taken down. I mentioned a few successful ones in the other thread.

<http://allyourwords.com>, a site that made about $1000 selling word-to-
website associations (kind of like million dollar homepage), but then I took
it down due to maintenance.

<http://ohbigdeal.com>, was auto-updating by crawling forums for amazon deals
and adding my affiliate code, but I could never get it to take off. Now I
haven't touched it in months and the update code appears to have broken.

donotpress.me, donotpressme.com, etc., was a gimmicky attempt at a viral site
that went nowhere.

------
giffo
side projects don't die, they just get put back on the shelf for another stab
at it later on

~~~
mathgladiator
That's very true; every side project I've ever done has a piece of it living
on in my current projects. I've found its important in life to know when to
kill a side project that just isn't working, understand its pros and cons,
move on and don't repeat the same mistake.

------
joshwa
FlowThing: an app to organize your search for...anything! (jobs, apartments,
cars, air conditioners, match.com profiles, etc)

<http://twitpic.com/2vedlp> <http://twitpic.com/2vef3n>

You get a bookmarklet to save a listing from any site, keep track of the
relevant bits of data (company, square feet, salary, bedrooms, mileage, etc),
and move them through a little workflow (interested, applied, contacted, lost,
etc). All the fields and workflows are completely customizable.

I built it after a simultaneous job and apartment search, having been
incredibly frustrated that craigslist didn't have a "my craigslist" like "my
ebay" or "my monster", and the fact that you're never looking at just one site
when you're searching. I was always scared that I was applying to the same job
or apartment twice.

It's been on the backburner for a while, since my day job has gotten busy, so
there's no help available and signups are invite-only right now. But you guys
seem like the kind of people who can figure it out pretty easily ;)

Here are some invite codes:

<http://pastie.org/1208657>

~~~
dholowiski
Out of curiosity, why invite only?

~~~
joshwa
Not ready for open signups yet-- I don't even have a homepage explaining what
it does, nor any help docs.

I'll try to bang some out next week...

------
joelhaus
Does anyone have an interest in selling their dead side project?

This idea is probably it's own dead side project, but if enough people show
interest, I'll put up a community spreadsheet. Personally, I think there is
definitely a market here and a buyers ability to execute on the
marketing/business can certainly make a big difference.

Made the spreadsheet anyway. Use this form to add a listing:
[https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFZQc0ZQQWZ...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFZQc0ZQQWZhQ0NEa0c3ZDdqUTR2TFE6MQ)

See responses here:
[https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApjfoQFi7q_7dFZQc0Z...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApjfoQFi7q_7dFZQc0ZQQWZhQ0NEa0c3ZDdqUTR2TFE&hl=en&authkey=CMmsh6AP)

------
daleharvey
the great thing about side projects is they cant "fail"

I have <http://erldocs.com> \- nice ui to the erlang documentation
<http://arandomurl.com> \- blog / html5 games <http://pastebin.me> \- pastebin
that executes js <http://erlangotp.com> \- information about erlang
<http://talk.io> \- chat client

some are virtually silent, some are reasonably popular, I dont worry about
promoting them or getting visitors etc, 2 of them are still yet to be done and
I am under no pressure to finish, I can just do them in my own time.

~~~
rubyrescue
erldocs is my favorite docs site - it's a success in my book!

~~~
daleharvey
awesome, thanks :)

------
nezumi
Seems quiet in here...

The trouble is, side projects go unfinished and become dormant, but they never
really die - they haven't been born yet.

------
theIntuitionist
<http://emailops.com> \- creates an ascii formated schedule for email
arbitration. Was used by several professors in india to schedule meeting times
for study sessions. Never took off.

<http://celebrityladder.com> \- reddit like voting system for anything
taggable. Was only intended for me to learn RoR- i killed it almost
immediately. Thought it was a really dumb idea as soon as it went live, but I
haven't been able to clear it completely from my mind yet.

<http://theuniveristy.org> \- a really cool social network which only used the
web for organizing. Rest was done through the mail. Inspired by the zine/mail
art world that was more or less killed by the web. Basically, it paired 12
people randomly, then once a week for 3 months (12 weeks) somebody was
supposed to send some thing to the other 11 people in their class. This
actually worked for folks, but some people didn't participate, and I had no
idea how to manage the community. Was around 2000, maybe friendster was just
around, and there weren't establish patterns for handling things like this,
and mostly I was interested in just creating it. But, this project has really
stuck in my mind. If there is interest here in this project, i'll bring it
back to life.

So many others that never were completed....

------
dholowiski
I was hoping someone would ask- it's as useful to hear about the 'failures' as
it is to hear about the successes, especially since there are so many more of
them.

Tweet my pasteboard and Speed Tweet - two iPhone apps I wrote. I probably
spent 50-100 hours on them, and $200 (to be a registered apple developer for 2
years). One was ad supported, one was 0.99. Total revenue about $20. Both are
officially dead now that only oauth sign on is allowed for Twitter.

Tankbuddy.com - my first shot at a ruby on rails app. You could enter the
details about your fish tank(s), and record readings (ph, temperature etc). I
had big plans. Sadly, after a few weeks I wasn't even using the site myself,
and was still paying $15 a month for hosting. Traffic was essentially 0 and
the project was killed when I cancelled the hosting account.

I have a new project (<http://localbeer.me> \- helping you find locally
breewed beer) that I am very hopeful for. I paid for a year of hosting in
advance, so even if I choose to ignore the project for a few months it's not
costing me anything. This week was big, I had over 200 visitors from a link I
posted to reddit.

As others have said, I have many more side projects, but they're not dead,
just forgotten. Unlike others, to date not a single one of my side projects
has turned a profit.

------
kilian
Not as interesting as some of the others, but:

<http://websitesthatdontworkwithoutwww.com> \- 'naming and shaming' websites
that have a shoddy sysasmin, and a massive petpeeve of mine, but it hasn't
been getting any traction so I plan on taking it offline.

Youtubetopten.com (no longer online) - daily top ten of youtube videos voted
for by facebook users. Never got any traction either.

------
city41
None of the ones mentioned here are still up:

(2001) gbafan.com -- A Gameboy Advance review site. It did pretty well. Had a
staff of three writers and good amounts of traffic. I wrote the review
submission system in PHP and it was my first exposure to web development.

(2006) saidsecrets.com -- Anonymous polling site. I can't for the life of me
think of the name of that polling site that runs on the reddit engine, but it
was just like that. I wrote it 100% from scratch using XMLHTTPRequest as a
means to learn AJAX/JS before moving onto an AJAX framework.

(2006) fitaculous.com -- a Social networking site with a fitness theme. The
idea was people would motivate their friends to keep working out/eating
healthy. It tracked calories (or weight watcher points) as well as your
workouts, BMI, weigh-ins, etc. At its peak it had about 2500 members. I did it
with Rails.

(2008) -- Turrets iPhone game. I only had it in the app store for a 3 days and
it made me $200, so I was actually pretty happy about that. I pulled it as my
employer at the time did not allow that kind of moonlighting and I feared
losing my job.

~~~
thorax
Why not sell the iPhone game to someone and just pocket a little cash from
selling the rights to it?

~~~
city41
I'm no longer with that employer so I am planning on sprucing it up a bit and
re-releasing it.

------
btucker
2002 - LootMail - Audio (phone) based interface to your email. Built on top of
TellMe (back when they had a service pretty similar to Twilio today, based on
VoiceXML. Died when TellMe killed off their "Extensions" program.

2004 - <http://openpodcast.org> \- At the dawn of podcasting, I thought a
podcast feed anyone could fill with audio content would be cool. The system
was email-based: you sent an attached mp3 to submit@opencast.org and it would
show up in the feed (there was also a phone number you could call to leave a
recording). It was pretty popular as podcasting was getting off the ground.
Adam Curry helped promote it.

2008 - <http://quotably.com> \- Got the idea that a threaded view of twitter
would be useful. Built it in a weekend, posted about it here on HN Sunday
night, Arrington wrote a TC post, Scoble tweeted it, and next thing I knew
there were upwards of 250K uniques Monday. I ended up killing it 6 months
later because twitter turned off the firehose.

------
there
candlestickpro.com - a site i created with a friend of a friend to track stock
portfolios and offer buy/sell recommendations based on candlestick patterns.
the business plan was to charge a monthly membership fee as well as invest
some of that money in stocks the site recommended (which would also serve as
marketing for how good the recommendations were). the business relationship
went sour and the site never came to fruition.

1.8T.org - started as a vw/audi car enthusiast website offering web hosting
and email forwards. i eventually started a vw/audi dealer ratings site on it
instead which became very popular among the community and dealer network. a
few dealers took it too seriously and started posting fake negative reviews of
other dealers and constantly complaining to me. dealing with all the angry
people sucked the fun out of it, and other, more generalized car dealer review
sites popped up, so i shut it down. made money with adsense. still own 8t.org
with nothing to use it for.

ramblin.gs - a forum site that i created to experiment with some forum
software i was working on. the community never prospered much, but i released
the (awful, hacked-together) software which some people ran with and created
some new communities with it that continue to operate.

wen - an attempt to create a simple scheduling site that could parse natural
language entries and turn them into calendars/alerts. got too involved in
perfecting the parser that i got bored with it and never launched it.

deskto.ps - a screenshot sharing website to be like flickr but more adept at
handling large images. users could tag programs (draw borders around them,
like flickr's notes) running in their screenshots and it would automatically
assemble lists of most popular software and connect people to find
themes/icons/support/whatever for the software they liked that other people
were using. it would make money by letting commercial software developers
sponsor the pages for their software that users tagged. stopped working on it,
never renewed the domain and someone snagged it.

sellister.com - a better craigslist that offered feedback profiles/karma like
ebay to help people feel more comfortable dealing with strangers. never got it
off the ground, but i still hate selling things on ebay and craigslist.

<http://den.im/> \- an rss reader that i made two years ago to clone the old
bloglines interface because i hated the new one and their site was always
randomly not updating feeds. added twitter integration, made an iphone/android
version, and continue to use it every day but can never find the motivation to
open it up out of private beta. there are much nicer rss readers out there now
and i don't think i have the resources available to host a huge number of
users for free.

~~~
decadentcactus
Do you still have the parser from 'wen'? Seems like it could still be put to
good use if it worked well enough.

~~~
there
i do, though it ended up being a lot like chronic
(<http://chronic.rubyforge.org/>) except you could give it a full string
("walk the dog tomorrow at 3pm", "next monday is bob's birthday") and it could
parse out the time/date and store the other parts as the event.

------
rglullis
Given that the OP created a bunch of Ask HN questions today and the account is
1-day old, I presume it's a throwaway.

I am curious to know why.

------
mthoms
Yotophoto.com

Was the web's first search engine for libre (free to use) images, mostly
Creative Commons and Public Domain. One of the things I'm most proud of was a
"search by color" feature that was very fast, accurate and way ahead of what
anyone else was doing at the time (IMHO).

Yotophoto was doing a million searches (~100k unique) per day at one point.

~~~
dholowiski
How come you killed it? I'm guessing it's because it was tough to monetize?

~~~
mthoms
It wasn't necessarily difficult to monetize (mostly via ads for Microstock
imagery sites). But it was quite difficult to scale the technology. I made
great progress optimizing the crawler and search tech but eventually lost
interest.

Google and Flickr also added Creative Commons image search options eventually.

------
itsandrew
<http://theshirtsite.com> (No longer functioning) - I aggregated t-shirt
designs across the web and built a centralized/searchable site for them. Every
t-shirt I linked to was hooked up to some sort of affiliate program, so if the
user clicked through and bought the shirt, I got a cut of the sale. Never
really took off, but made a little cash for beer in my college years.

<http://yaperture.com> (Still up in artifact form) - A site for users to
submit photos, have the community vote on the best, then we would mat, print,
and sell them giving a user a cut of each sale. The market for real
photography isn't that great, so it never generated enough money for us to
break even. Regardless, it was a great experience and nice intro into some
heavier development and co-founder life for me.

------
sandGorgon
Mine was a predictive road traffic alert service in India. Wanted to use cell
phone data along with congestion prediction to send SMS alerts about traffic
jams.

We (me and a couple of guys and profs from academic research bodies) started
work on it - I spoke to some of the biggest VCs. I was told by all of them
that people in India dont care about traffic - so it is not a problem worth
funding.

In retrospective, I should have stuck with it a bit more, but it was not a
low-cost startup idea (most of the money would have been spent on Ph.D
salaries) and maybe also have co-founders who beleived in the idea more (mine
didnt).

But I ended up doing a services startup, which is doing OK - 13 people now!

------
yummyfajitas
Spam email autoreplier. I built a toy version in lamson which gave credible
(to me) responses - "Yes, I am very interested in earning $1 MILLION
($1,000,000) dollars from your dead Nigerian uncle." I went into my gmail spam
folder to look for a training corpus, and found that the Nigerians have given
up.

Eigenshare - online document sharing for latex-using scientists. Basically,
built in document sharing, version control, etc. Couldn't get anyone to use
it.

Timeserieszen - scrape a lot of timeseries data from various government
agencies, and make a nice display for it (answers questions: "how have annual
working hours evolved since 1960"). Never really followed through on it.

Quite a few more.

------
oscilloscope
Connect Shapes -- <http://connectshapes.com/>

Network Graphing/Flow Chart prototype. Started out toying with RaphaelJS, but
I hit a lot of cross-browser bugs having to do with a DOM issues, arrays, and
side-effects in general. There are a lot of cool graphing programs now, so I
don't plan to work further on a standalone app-- but might use it as an
interface for a later project.

On the upside, I learned about closures doing this project and ended up
dropping it to learn more about functional programming.

------
apike
Whenever one of my side projects fails, I try to write a post-mortem. This is
often interesting to my audience, but even more helpful for me.

The most fun I had failing at a side project was my second online game,
Engineering Faith. It failed due to Second System Effect, where I added so
many variables and complexities that it was no longer a sane or fun game to
play. My post-mortem on it is here, with annotated screenshots:
<http://www.antipode.ca/engineering-faith/>

------
garrettgillas
Know n' Show - knownshow.com was a startup weekend prototype that myself and a
ColdFusion developer built in 2 days at the Microsoft campus during SW
Redmond. It was a HR management web app that wasn't really going to be much
better than any given wiki platform. The other problem was that our group was
too big. The cool thing was that it was my fist attempt to build something so
quickly and got to meet some really cool people. Just about everything else
(the product, the name, the team, the technology) was bad though.

~~~
garrettgillas
I guess I have also built about a half dozen html/CSS frameworks for different
large scale projects but never bothered to put them out into the public. Also,
I've built a couple wordpress plugins and hacks that I use extensively
personally but never put out there as well.

~~~
chopsueyar
What do the Wordpress plugins do?

------
redsymbol
Had several, this is the biggest one:

<http://findforme.net>

I had a total absolute blast coding it the summer before last (python and
django, interfacing with the Amazon affiliate program REST apis). But I never
managed to build a user base for it (probably because it's just too complex to
use), and eventually moved my focus elsewhere.

------
kaffeinecoma
SlimPoints: <http://slimpoints.appspot.com> \-- a diary app for tracking
Weight Watchers points

Create-A-Password: <http://create-a-password.appspot.com> \-- an app for
creating memorable (yet secure) passwords

Both created with GWT and Google App Engine.

------
boundlessdreamz
<http://www.celebtwits.com/> \- Got no traction. Been dead since twitter auth
change.

~~~
there
i wonder how many other twitter projects got killed when they dropped basic
auth. implementing oauth in an old one-off project that only uses one twitter
account to access their api is just a pain in the ass.

i used to let people tweet messages to @going2rain and have them show up on
the bottom of <http://goingtorain.com/> in a random rotation, but the process
of switching it over to oauth was just not worth the trouble so i disabled
that functionality.

~~~
PonyGumbo
> implementing oauth in an old one-off project that only uses one twitter
> account to access their api is just a pain in the ass.

There's a way around it. IIRC, you just have to sign up for the developer
account using the same credentials as your Twitter account, and it allows you
to create a permanent key. It's been months since I did it, but the app I
built still works.

------
siruva07
<http://www.prximity.com>

Thought it'd be a cool way to build a location based city guide -- but clearly
this had to be mobile and we didn't have the right dev team to build the
rest...we were manually entering information (we figured the best content
would be curated, rather than aggregated) Deadpooled in feb 10..

------
consultutah
<http://scripturefeeds.com> \- RSS feeds giving you a chapter a day from your
choice of scriptural books: old testament, new testament, and others from the
Mormon faith. Never made any money, never really had a way to try. Killed it
when I switched hosting providers. Just never got around to putting it back
up.

------
jwegan
RxnStream - <http://rxnstream.com> \- Allowed you to share internet videos
with your friends and watch them while they watched the video. Thought it
would be great for sharing shocking videos, but it never really took off. Site
is still up, but I'm not actively pursuing it anymore.

------
benologist
I made this huge-ass .NET version of digg which died really quietly. Spent
months on the code base, did all kinds of cool stuff like converting links to
images/videos/etc from specific sites (eg youtube) so you could view them in
comments.

------
mathgladiator
when I was a graduate student, I wrote tutor
(<http://github.com/mathgladiator/tutor> ) which was a student-orientated
compute algebra system. The idea was to give it a college algebra to calculus
II problem, and it would spit out a right answer with a complete step by step
explanation.

I actually had students using it, but I got distracted by my game engine.

If I go back to teaching, then I will probably make a start-up out of this.

------
whimsy
Time constraints: we weren't making significant process on the core idea, and
we're both very busy students, so the side project fell by the wayside.

------
lovskogen
A project managment based upon Google Wave :)

~~~
thorax
Still around somewhere?

~~~
lovskogen
No, didn't even made it out to beta. I don't know if that count as deadpooling
though.

------
YuriNiyazov
playfirstlife.com - started out as facetoflife.com - had a cofounder and a
plan and everything, but then the cofounder decided to go do something else
and I had some medical issues coincide at the same time. By the time I handled
everything, there were at least 6 full-time competitors.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
And of course, omnivoredating.com - a dating site for people who specifically
want to avoid meeting vegans/vegetarians. That was an awesome brainfart.

------
rubyrescue
mileguru.com - frequent flyer mile aggregator. it just never got finished and
fell by the wayside due to other partnerships and projects...

------
seiji
Can we rate limit Ask/Tell/Show HN posts? There are currently seven on the
front page (and another nine on the second page). Three on the front page are
from this new SomeoneAtHN anonymous account.

Maybe one Ask/Tell/Show allowed per user every week?

~~~
elbenshira
I think this is a legit concern, but there isn't enough evidence that this
trend will continue.

~~~
petercooper
Yeah, no fads roll on for more than a few days here despite people believing
they will. Even around the iPad keynote and launch, it blew past after a few
days (ended by a flood of Erlang related posts, I recall).

