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.
(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 :)
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 ;)
# 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.
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
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.
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:
I'll try to bang some out next week...
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...
See responses here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApjfoQFi7q_7dFZQc0Z...
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.
The trouble is, side projects go unfinished and become dormant, but they never really die - they haven't been born yet.
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....
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
I am curious to know why.
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.
Google and Flickr also added Creative Commons image search options eventually.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
Maybe one Ask/Tell/Show allowed per user every week?
I think that this is enough and we don't need any more limits. Moreover some of them are really good and insightful in my opinion, so I don't feel the need of a limit at all.