I was building a system in early 2004 that crawled and cached RSS feeds to collate them into streams for users based on subscriptions. My intention was to have

I was building a system in early 2004 that crawled and cached RSS feeds to collate them into streams for users based on subscriptions. My intention was to have one set of crawlers bring things into a large cache that could be accessed by a use base vs. having everyone constantly hitting up every website for the latest RSS entries and reduce overall traffic (excessive RSS traffic was an issue at the time) and to also provide people with consistent website formatting (enhancing readability) and all of those other no-brainer things that we take for granted now. I'd progressed quite well and had a handful of people who were helping me test it out thoroughly addicted to using it to consume the latest news from their favorite sites. I spent entirely too much time building in social features and essentially recreating LiveJournal (Live Journal's ability to allow you to follow all of your friends blogs in a somewhat clean format was my inspiration but applied to any RSS source) and by the time I was ready to take it to the next level Google announced Reader and I abandoned the project (beaten to market by Google yet again) I had other distractions that made it an easy decision but I guess I shouldn't have given in so easily. Live and learn!