8 ms·
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.
- aristus 19y agohttp://dowser.sf.net 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.
- cousin_it 19y agoI guess nowadays such things are made as Firefox extensions, e.g. Breadcrumbs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2954 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2954 .
- aristus 19y agoYep. When the Slogger plugin came out I decided Dowser's time had come & gone.
- anotherjesse 19y agoDowser 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 19y agoThat's... actually very cool and gratifying to hear. Thank you. :)
- markbao 19y agohttp://cadmium.avecora.com/ 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. :/
- cousin_it 19y agoGreat sense of web design on all your sites, and being 15 is pretty impressive too :-)
- jbenz 19y agoI second this. Very clean but also dramatic. Good work on the logo, too. 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.
- markbao 19y agoThe analytics 'dashboard': http://files.markbao.com/cadmium-db.png http://files.markbao.com/cadmium-db.png The data collection results visualizer (insights): http://files.markbao.com/cadmium-insights.png http://files.markbao.com/cadmium-insights.png Thanks for your kind words!
- Raphael 19y agoAwesome job. Pie charts are generally not the way to go, though.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- diego 19y agohttp://tagger.flaptor.com 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 19y agoKickass! 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 19y agoYes, 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 19y agoHave you looked at work done on keyword extraction from academic literature? http://www.nzdl.org/Kea/ http://www.nzdl.org/Kea/ It's simple and accurate.
- diego 19y agoYes, 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.
- 19y ago
- art_wells 19y agohttp://nshrine.com/ 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 19y agoI love your wording: "Keep This Shrine Ad Free" :-)
- localdataplace 19y agohttp://free.LocalDataPlace.com 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.
- cousin_it 19y agoWe used to think Google Maps KML search would dominate this area. Now I'm not so sure.
- calvin 19y agoYou 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.
- paulhart 19y agoI've got something similar to that - http://relovable.com/ http://relovable.com/ - designed to target the parenting niche. Kids grow (zing!) through clothes at an alarming rate. 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.
- thinkcomp 19y agohttp://www.thinkcomputer.com/software/exponent http://www.thinkcomputer.com/software/exponent Sure beats QuickBooks.
- cousin_it 19y agoWhy did this fail? Also, "Inventors of The Facebook"?
- vlad 19y agoI tried it maybe 2 years ago. I signed in a month later and noticed there was a vendor button (or something like it) where it listed my name and address in public location for everybody to see, along with that of all other users. I think it was a list of "vendors" (ie, to buy from other thinkcomp users.) The page was white. There was no way to disable it. I ended up e-mailing somebody to remove my name from the list. I'm not sure that it beats QuickBooks, even though I haven't tried either product recently. And I wouldn't worry about Facebook.
- thinkcomp 19y agoThis isn't an entirely fair criticism. The section you are talking about was labeled "Marketplace," and it was intended to be a way for users of the software to find other companies to either network with or buy/sell from/to. It was completely independent of the "Vendors" section and had no bearing on the accounting aspects of the software. The feature has since been removed, in any case, since I didn't have enough time to work on it.
- jward 19y agohttp://www.imageboard.net/top/ 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 19y agoThat's a great idea, and a great domain name. You didn't go forward?
- jward 19y agoNo 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
- jfarmer 19y agoLots of, uh, phalluses.
- staticshock 19y agothat's simply the mysterious way in which 4chan operates. but it's a good observation. maybe this tool can attract a different niche audience if there was a way to create a fresh, empty canvas forum that wouldn't intersect with the current website in too many ways.
- technoguyrob 19y agohttp://www.imageboard.net/accounts/login/ http://www.imageboard.net/accounts/login/ NO TEXT, HUH? Just kidding, that's pretty cool. :)
- edawerd 19y agohttp://www.mygrub.net 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.
- STHayden 19y agohttp://www.flugpo.com 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 19y agoThe world needs an antisocial network, where each user is explicitly supposed to swindle others.
- coglethorpe 19y agoI've used this site and I like it.
- tonystubblebine 19y agoNot that it was built to change the world, but I've personally been very happy with http://www.iheartquotes.com/ 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 http://www.iheartquotes.com/tags/paul_graham On Twitter http://www.twitter.com/iheartquotes http://www.twitter.com/iheartquotes In my .bash_profile curl -m 3 http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random
- cousin_it 19y agoThis site makes me happy too! Thanks for sharing :-)
- daleharvey 19y agoNothing world changing, but the pastebin I wrote recently, I find it pretty handy for sharing js snippets http://paste.arandomurl.com/ 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 http://paste.arandomurl.com/4826dda37f28b
- cousin_it 19y agoI once did the same for ActionScript. And of course this stuff works best for visually-oriented languages, like CFDG: http://korsh.com/cfdg/ http://korsh.com/cfdg/
- chriszf 19y agohttp://lifeshelf.net 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.
- epi0Bauqu 19y agohttp://watrcoolr.us 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.
- mosburger 19y agoThis site is very, very cool. I really appreciate super-minimalistic UI's like this. I've bookmarked it. :)
- jmackinn 19y agoI have to say the arrow key navigation is awesome. I hate to have to click all over and the fact that there is only one story at a time yet I can navigate to others easily is very appealing.
- cousin_it 19y agoThat's one great UI, thanks for sharing!
- bbgm 19y agoWe should start a movement for watrcooler. Love the design, especially the keyboard nav
- epi0Bauqu 19y agoWell, I'm certainly interested in spreading it, I just don't have any great ideas for how to do so. At one point I had it so you could email the links off the site to other people, but it wasn't used much so I dropped it in favor of dropping clutter.
- Ilia 19y agoresently I released http://www.fictionthis.com/ 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?
- brlewis 19y agohttp://brl.codesimply.net/ 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.
- breily 19y agohttp://search.brianreily.com 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.
- rochers 19y agohttp://www.thephotostream.com http://www.thephotostream.com could change the way people consume their daily web.
- agentbleu 19y agoI think some of these projects are better than whats out there. This one is pretty interesting IMO.
- cousin_it 19y agoNice! Make it scroll scroll scroll as people add new stories.
- apgwoz 19y agoI meant to link this on my photography blog when I saw it a while back. Did it now instead: http://www.photub.com/2008/May/13/photo-stream/ http://www.photub.com/2008/May/13/photo-stream/
- Fuca 19y agocool site
- apgwoz 19y agomaybe it wouldn't change the world, but if you're into reading multiple local papers "popurls style" http://www.newshoured.com/ http://www.newshoured.com/ might be a friend.
- mosburger 19y agoHa... I was thinking about making the exact same thing! I was going to target it for mobile audiences. Yours seems to work pretty well!
- adammichaelc 19y agoWow! This is so cool. Good job. Great format.
- kjell 19y agohttp://fidness.com 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.
- mosburger 19y agoA 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 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 19y agoThat'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 19y agoYeah, 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. :/
- mosburger 19y agoMaybe 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. :)
- Diogenes 19y agoCertainly 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 http://www.famoushotdish.com And yes, this was before we had even heard of alltop. Our first version was in October 07.
- wastedbrains 19y agohttp://seekler.com 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 19y agoIt's a shame - the idea is quite nice. Could use a simpler UI.
- nazgulnarsil 19y agoyeah, my blog is awesome :p
- dmnd 19y agoPerhaps 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 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.
- mudge 19y agohttp://newsconomy.com/ http://newsconomy.com/ Social bookmarking and news website.
- deepfall 19y agohttp://www.answermonk.com 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.
- fresh 19y agodigg.com
- pokerup 19y agohttp://www.pokerup.us 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.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- sonink 19y agohttp://www.merawaala.com http://www.merawaala.com create,share and embed comparisons .. kind of like a youtube for comparisons
- duthel 19y agohttp://www.euroreports.net/ http://www.euroreports.net/ Free Websitesubmission By H. Google Earth Community My Promotion And Sponsors Immobilier Et Annonces Immob News, Videos, Images Gratis Telefonieren Und Grat Charlie Bit My Finger - Agai Das Ende Der Demokratie Literature Alternative Medicine, Duthel Which Secret Service Is Watc More Than 10 Million Custome SWISS 'Air' Is Not Switzerla Thinking The Unthinkable Ping Now Free By H. Duthel Streets Of London Hostonnet.com DE GAULLE, Charles Bei Uns Finden Sie Was Sie.. H. Duthel, Author, Philosoph Addictomatic Www.lycos.de YouTube - MarleneDuthel's Ch News About News Gadget News Author And Philosoph Bestseller Adressaufkleber - Ask YC: Have You Built A Goo H. Duthel Released New Book: 20Minutes.fr, Information En Global Secret - I Global Secret - III History and philosophy of.. AgoraVox le média citoyen Die Herausforderung “Man’s of Honor” Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend
- duthel 19y agoGreat, check it out!
- hariskh 19y agoSimple fun site to review companies. http://www.pingmycompany.com http://www.pingmycompany.com
- naich 19y agoNot 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 http://www.maggenhoof.co.uk/mortgage
- epi0Bauqu 19y agoThanks! 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.
- vpweb 19y agoYa, but I forgot the link since I haven't visited it in a while. :)
- jdavid 19y agowhen 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.
- josefresco 19y agohttp://www.OtherWeather.com 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 :(
- tpimental 19y agohttp://www.feedcrush.com http://www.feedcrush.com A mashup of 1 college radio station's play data with much larger ambitions...
- paraschopra 19y agoNever had the resources to launch an advertising network (http://precimark.com http://precimark.com), an independent music platform (http://kroomsa.com http://kroomsa.com), a startup aggregator (http://startuplogic.com 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?
- 0x28aa1f185a6b4 19y agoduthel's comment is not spam.
- swhnorton 19y agohttp://maps.staticrooster.com/ http://maps.staticrooster.com/ GPS overlay data on maps with geosynced photos. Like personal Google maps w/ panoramio.
- cousin_it 19y agoHey, that's a great way to show photos on the map! Why didn't I think about that?
- russw 19y agobitpal.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
- japanoid 19y agoJust 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 http://thatscool.org I'll send you an invite, pronto. Add something, anything!!
- tlrobinson 19y agohttp://toobs.tlrobinson.net 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.
- sfalbo 19y agohttp://MyHouseResearch.com 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?
- NewWorldOrder 19y agohttp://esposure.com 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.
- cwisecarver 19y agohttp://www.jihadonyou.com 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.
- kynikos 19y agohttp://www.thecollegeblognetwork.com 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.
- duthel 18y agoChalee - Marlene Duthel Art & Sound This site shows Artwork or Art by Marlene and Chalee Duthel http://gallery.chaleeduthel.com/displayimage.php?pos=-19 http://gallery.chaleeduthel.com/displayimage.php?pos=-19
- res2 18y agohttp://www.mylistwatcher.com 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!