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Comment by bherms | Hacker News Reader

Finally... Living in Indy and knowing several people behind this, I knew it was doomed from day one. Social plays like this try to do nothing more than capitalize on trends without adding any real value. They pivoted from a form generating site to a virality play, which was never even executed well to begin with.

...and now they shoot for a photo app. <sarcasm> Good work </sarcasm>

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You know what commands respect in my book? Actually doing something. Doing a startup is hard, getting as many users as formspring is even harder.

You know what doesn't command respect? Being an armchair quarterback snarking that they should have done more.

Seriously? 30 million users at FormSpring's peak seems to be executed relatively well. It was no Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, but 30 million users is a damn good failure as far as I'm concerned.

Now if you want to talk about social plays that capitalize on trends with without adding any real value that are not executed especially well, then we can talk about Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning"s travesty that is Airtime.

30 million users generating no revenue.

edit: and retention rates were abysmal. 30 million people signed up is a vanity metric. actual "users" was a very, very small fraction of that

I have a hard time criticizing someone for taking a ride on something that was grew from 0 to 30 million uniques in 6 months, just to see where it goes. You're right it wasn't super sticky and failed to drive long term utility for users, but I think most of us here would want to take a swing at that kind of growth and turn it into something that had long term value.

Thank you for summarizing what I was really trying to say here, chaz. Even half of YC's consumer focused tech companies should be so lucky.

The team, the direction they took the product, and the VCs/funding aside, Ade's clearly massive effort is inspiring and should be congratulated rather than completely drown out with sarcasm.

Correction: generating revenue. Just not enough to cover the costs.

I thought it was pretty interesting while it stuck to the "ask me anything" gimmick. I liked that idea, and I liked that you could get anonymous questions. But then I started seeing social details getting added that made me suspect they wanted more to be like Facebook than to be, you know, the unique presence they actually were. Not that I could blame them, but if I wanted facebook, you know, I'd go to facebook. So Formspring basically turned into an awkward imageboard/microblogging app. And then one day it was impossible for me to even log in. Except through the facebook app, from which I disabled my account (because AFAIK they're one of those sites which believes it should be impossible to actually delete your account) and never looked back.

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