Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?
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.
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.
Do you think you would use a tech subwatrcoolr? If so, what "most emailed" equiv. feeds do you think there are in tech. I can think of programming.reddit.com, equivalent digg section, news.yc, yahoo most emailed tech.
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?
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.
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.
Mozilla's start page with the google box is nice but nothing compared to dowser.
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. :/
The "learn more" section under "advertiser" states that "Cadmium provides a deep data collection system". Did you design something of an analytics dashboard as well? If it looks half as nice as the rest of the site, I'd be impressed.
The data collection results visualizer (insights): http://files.markbao.com/cadmium-insights.png
Thanks for your kind words!
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.
Another alternative is to name yourself Zed, then emigrate to the UK.
Beat that!
(With apologies for the figure of speech to our poker playing friends).
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".
It is, however, my legally recognized name.
And very astute from a business perspective. Every time there is an ad network acquisition my first thought is, "Wow, that must be the last one of those", because there have been so many, and all of the really well-known names have already been acquired. But the reality is that advertising on the web is becoming more important every day, and more valuable every day. It will continue to grow at the same pace as the Internet itself, and so any innovative advertising play is probably a smart one. Mobile advertising is also a world that is currently untapped.
And, interestingly, at least to me, advertising is a market where no matter how many established players there are, there's always room for someone to be "high touch" in a particular industry and be able to build a nice sized business. My brother-in-law works in old media advertising (which has been a well-settled market for over fifty years), and yet he's built an independent agency over the past twelve years or so that employs a number of people and makes plenty of money (where "plenty"==$millions). He does it by building relationships, and doing good work.
And 15 yr olds. I mean, I've met some kids who are better hackers than I would ever dream of being -- I'm guessing that markbao is in that category. So concentrating on the guy's age seems like completely the wrong take on this.
If you're not in stealth mode, may I ask what is your current venture?
It'd be kinda meta if I created such a site, then submitted that site to itself when no one showed up. :)
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 ;)
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
great concept, i'm glad some crowd picked it up. seems like something 4chan or ytmnd would dig.
It's still mostly a demo, we are improving it very slowly because most of our resources are going into other projects.
It's simple and accurate.
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.
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.
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
1) See "more" than the 28 newest on the homepage.
AND
2) See when people click / add stories to the stream.
I made it scroll :-)
Scott
it shows the page rendered above in a frame below, you can test snippets of javascript / css in it, processing js works as well
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?
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.
It would be better (for me that is) if you included some refinance options, i.e. compare your current mortgage to your refinance options.
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.
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.
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.
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?
GPS overlay data on maps with geosynced photos. Like personal Google maps w/ panoramio.
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.
And yes, this was before we had even heard of alltop. Our first version was in October 07.
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. :)
I guess that's one of my favorite things about HN. Loads fast and only need to scroll on the most commented articles.
Sure beats QuickBooks.
I'm not sure that it beats QuickBooks, even though I haven't tried either product recently. And I wouldn't worry about Facebook.
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.
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.
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 :(
To be fair, it was built in 24 hours for a programming contest two years ago, and hasn't been touched since.
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.
not sure if it I'd consider it a failure, but definitely has not seen the organic growth that we initially expected.
Inexplicably, when you ask people to name an easy-to-learn language that's designed for web/database applications, they still say PHP.
I thinks its a great idea, but traffic has been slowly disappearing.. feedback anyone?
A mashup of 1 college radio station's play data with much larger ambitions...
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.
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.
I never bothered to attempt to market it at all - it was more a proof-of-concept that I could do something with Rails. Still think it has value though.