So, you have Javascript which was better performance and worked everywhere.
I think it's a little misleading to say it's the best feature no one ever used. CSS expressions were re-born as hardware-accelerated CSS3 transitions - with a much better, more focused implementation, and are pretty popular these days - especially for mobile.
Probable reason: some people would rather perform their own appendectomy than read a manual.
Seriously, I have often included features on strong user request (MUST! HAVE!) against my own better judgement, only to find that, surprise, they are not used. I don't necessarily regret it, there is a certain advantage to looking responsive regardless of the request.
Regarding Google indexing the site, was that toungue-in-cheek? If not, you may want to consider some basic changes to the structure - I think its less that Google doesn't like your site and more that there's very little there to index.
What about curated author pages? Maybe with some information about the author and a list of his books by publishing date. I know, this may be too close to the Mahalo-model, but it could help with your low number of pages to index. You could start with your top searched authors.
And maybe you could show a little more information about the book when you click on it. I'm not sure what data Amazon provides - there must be more than just the picture, no?
It made the front page of Reddit a while back. My plan was to get traffic organically, but the site is basically one big violation of Google's policies (no original content, it's all search results, etc). The site doesn't even rank for it's own name, although it did for a few days after launch, until Google took notice, and blacklisted it.
I'd love to hear ideas for making something like this indexable. Generating a bunch of quality content around search results seems difficult (see: Mahalo), but maybe there's another approach I haven't thought of?
1) Show the last 200 searches that people had made (or the most popular for the past day, week, etc.)
2) Instead of directly linking to Amazon upon clicking a book/product, perhaps you should fly out some hidden details for the item (not ajax if feasible).
3) You could also have a "Search by Author" and "Search by Topic" link that is provided when you click a book that provides more results with content.
4) Maybe allow people to create book shelves that they can explain the grouping of a set of books and why they go well together (etc!).
5) One last idea: Provide a list beneath that has a tiny bit more info - as they scroll left/right in the top list, have the bottom scroll up/down to show the range that is visible. This would help with you only linking/showing 20 or so results at a time if you let the list (text) show 100 or more.
To make it indexable you need users to enter in text. Maybe you could have a mini wiki above the search results, where users describe the search they are trying to do or what the search means, or can annotate the search. With your current UI this would be really hard. I feel like the UI is cool on first blush but sort of limits your options as far as experimentation goes.
Just brainstorming here:
- maybe the hook could be: "judge books by their covers"
- the layout is pretty slick but constrains what you can do with the site. Have you considered scrolling down? It could be a differentiator though (your current layout that is).
- When you mouse over a book, have some type of overlay function: star the book, "have you read this book? what did you think?" (leave a comment), share on twitter / facebook (a necessary evil perhaps)
- when you click on a cover, it lightboxes in and has the things listed above
It's basically all user-generated-content, and it actually does rank on Google for a few things, but it's the wrong kind of traffic: People aren't in buying mode, very few visitors actually click through to Amazon and buy something.
I like this site - its cool :) I know its going against the point of the site but you could use the DOM to scrape the Product details and display them as links (you can link to any site without copyright infringement??) - if you don't want text you could always pass a small amount of info into the alt tags. If this sounds dumb feel free to ignore. But I like the idea of the site
Check out Rapidlibrary, they managed to turn a search engine into a top 1000 website. You have to be careful with taking the "creating pages around latest searches" approach, have a look at the latest searches on Rapidlibrary to see what I'm talking about.
Like another commenter pointed out you will need to create static pages for the search engines to find & index. You can do this by creating them automatically from the last x number of searches, if you were able to aggregate some other sources into the engine you could create custom landing pages showing all results rather than people clicking straight off to Amazon & having no dedicated page for each book title.
I think this one is awesome. I hate the teeny tiny pictures in Amazon - it does not compare to seeing books in the store. The downside is I don't really know what to search for. I like to go to a certain section (literature, programming, etc) and browse.
have you looked at http://picclick.com/ .. you have something, i think you're just missing the boat. Picclick has been getting a lot of traction as of late.
To understand... are you expecting Google to enter every possible search term into your search box and index the results? BTW, your site _requires_ javascript = SEO fail.
I actually got the web slice accepted into the IE addons gallery (http://www.ieaddons.com) after waiting a couple months for approval. Then I made a small revision to the entry, and for some reason that made it go back into the "pending approval" queue. I sent several emails to the website support contact and got no answers. Months later, Amazon came out with their own extension. I finally got a response from a Microsoft rep after escalating with a friend, and they told me about how my extension can't be posted due to a partnership agreement. Pretty lame.
pop-global-mark (C-x C-SPC) moves you around a global mark stack, and C-u set-mark-command (C-u C-SPC) does this locally in a buffer. (I use this hundreds of times a day.)
The bookmark package (go to "Bookmarks" in the Emacs info pages) give you persistent bookmarks, with a fairly nice interface.
I've written stuff in elisp only to find that it already existed in Emacs, too. Now, I usually check http://emacswiki.org first.
I had looked at global mark (pop-global-mark), local mark, and Bookmark but i didn't like their behaviors.
Global mark (or local mark) doesn't work on buffers that have been killed. When I jump back to a quick bookmark, I want its file loaded back into memory if its buffer has been killed.
Global mark doesn't work consistently. It seems to only remember the last mark set in a buffer, so it has an one mark per buffer behavior. The flow seems to use global mark to jump back to a buffer, then use local marks to jump to different points in the buffer. I want just one quick bookmark system, no global or local distinction, to remember multiple points in a buffer and multiple buffers.
Mark is kind of overloaded for different purposes. Its primary use is for marking regions (for copy/cut/etc). I turn on transient-mark-mode to better highlight regions. Whenever I made a mark for quick bookmarking, the region is highlighted and have to be canceled; it's very annoying.
The Bookmark package requires assigning a name for each bookmark, entering its name to jump back to the bookmark, and deleting the name when it's not needed. It is good for permanent bookmarks but very cumbersome for quick bookmarking. I just want to set anonymous quick bookmarks and jump back to them quickly. I don't want to manage the names.
The good thing about Emacs is that if you don't like the way things are working, you can roll your own. So I did.
Indeed. I'm no stranger to re-implementing something because no existing version was quite what I wanted, either. On rereading, my post didn't really come across like I intended.
Then again, even when implementing something that (it turns out) already exists, solving the problems that come up along the way almost always teaches one something.
And with Emacs extensions, even if you're the only one who finds it useful, it's still useful. :)
I'm not sure this is the "best feature" that no one uses, but it is one that I've always thought some crafty hacker could do something cool with.
BonjourFoxy[1] adds Bonjour support to Firefox and is predominately used to find websites advertised by printers, network cameras and so on, but it can also be used by other extensions to advertise and discover network services.
Currently the only extension I'm aware of that makes use of this is iGiro[2] which combined with an iPhone app let's you scan bill numbers straight into Firefox's text field.
Now admittedly I haven't got any killer P2P extensions in mind, but surely some other folks out there do —?
I built a multiuser blog for a site with two million plus users (soundpedia.com). I worked hard to make it scalable; making it static, easy sync with new servers in the cluster, etc... Themeable too. It was pretty sweet for the time frame.
Turns out we had an audience whose blogs were composed of copying lyrics and changing colours. You can guess not many really used it.
Oh well. SP went out of business a while after so I never had a chance to do what the audience really wanted (a like button)
Based on the terribly original idea of writing about your travel experiences. A couple good features (imo):
- Inherent credibility. I figured if you ask someone you meet on the street where's a good place to eat or stay - being a complete stranger - the chance of them giving you good information is about the same as flipping a coin: 50-50. So everyone starts with 50% credibility. As you write reviews and people are in agreement (via like/don't like or comments) your credibility goes up (influenced of course by the credibility of the commentor).
- Built in messaging and chat. Added some "bots" to make it look like there were actually more users at one point. The idea was to implement a parser so that you could ask someone in chat: "where's a cheap place to stay in guam?" the app would parse the query and a bot could answer with the highest rated hostel in that location for example.
- Parse search terms with ability to search by category. So if you search for "a bed to crash on" while you're in manhattan, the app prompts if you'd like to search the "lodging" category.
Reason for failure:
- Other people did it better (tripadvisor, virtual tourist, etc)
Basically it is a timer for jobseekers that runs in the background, to push them to spend a longer amount of time hunting for a job than they normally would (even if it isn't on our site). People have always known that the biggest difficulty with job-hunting is spending enough time on it, but it is really demonstrated by the this 2009 NYTimes interactive graphic: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/31/business/20080...
Despite some bloggers writing about it (http://helpmegethired.wordpress.com/2009/06/), it never took off. I'd say the failure came from the execution. It needed to be dead-simple to turn on (w/o requiring an account), and always present yet unintrusive. Maybe the next version...
On http://www.ratemystudentrental.com, it was Watch Lists. If there was no available rental property that matched what you searched for, you could just hit a button to "create Watch List" and RMSR would notify you when a rental that met your criteria was added to the site or became available. Everyone thought this sounded like a "great idea" for the week or so it took me to build. Now 2 years later, exactly 2 people have ever used it.
Why did it go unused (I wouldn't say it totally failed)? The biggest reason is probably because no one wants to use your site as much as you want them to. If they couldn't find what they wanted on my site right away, why would they stick around when they could just go look elsewhere?
That's why I ended up building the "Around the Web" feature, where if a rental couldn't be found on RMSR, it will aggregate and map properties from other sites (around the web). This feature was mildly more successful.
Quick and simple to make, thought I could make some money on referral fees, but went nowhere.
Failure, I suppose: browsers can do the same thing, with a little setup; and, more importantly, people seem to have a preference to navigate to each of these sites and search them directly.
I set something like this up myself with a Safari plugin. One thing I learned rather quickly:
nobody searches with capital letters, so hitting the shift key to make a ":" is a pretty big cost. Just use "g <search>", and detect prefixes you know; it's much faster and less awkward to use.
Konqueror has this feature since ages.
gg:foo for searching foo in google
ggi for google images
and much more, like imdb, even php for searching in php docs.
And thats the most awesome feature ever.
I like this site. I feel that having to type in the prefixes might be a blocker for the normal crowd. Have you tried some different UIs to make picking the service happen?
On top of that, most pages with a functioning search get recognized by Chrome, so for example if I type "e" and hit tab, Chrome lets me search "en.wikipedia.org".
I built a tool called Statzen that I shutdown because it didn't get traction. It had a feature that would show you what topics/tags from your blog were getting read (via web and/or rss) and what sub-topics within that topic were getting read most.
I think I should have just released that one feature as an MVP.
I'm intrigued by ur feature MVP. As a simple marketing/analytics tool for bloggers, this would help figure out the most popular keywords on site versus off site search SEO. BUILD IT AND I WILL COME! :)
This tool is based on ~25,000 college applications and shows you the relative preference for each college. It's not based on direct matchups but instead based on an Elo point system, so that all colleges can be ranked along one dimension (essentially, revealed student preference).
It's rarely used because it's really hard to find on the site. It's also tough to figure out how to choose the schools that show up, instead of just looking at the defaults. It's also possible that college applicants care way less about this sort of thing than I, a processor and curator of their data, do.
Assuming you've looked into it, how impossible is it to license all of a school's admission data (i.e. every applicant's GPA, SAT, and admission status) in some anonymous format?
I would have loved a tool that that would let me enter a GPA and SAT score and then using actual data could tell me that 500 students with comparable stats (like +/- 0.1 for GPA and +/- 50 for SAT) applied to school X last year and 380 were admitted.
It's true that it would make my life a lot easier since I wouldn't have to collect this information myself from individuals. I just rely on self-reporting and statistical techniques to achieve approximate results. Now that you mention it, it would be interesting to get the full data from one school and see how close to the truth we actually get.
The multiplayer mode of my Android game "Laska". There are just not enough active players to make it work.
But I like the feature because its based on AppEngine and XMPP, so it doesn't have any costs and will probably be available forever. (forever on the internet means sth. like 2-5 years)
I did have a website that pulled multiple RSS feeds (thousands) and then parsed each entry matching it to others that it had seen before. It could then show you what was popular at any moment on the web, with the ability to see what the article was linked to, and what they were linked to. It showed some interesting things like how a website was effected by something happening on the world stage.
The idea was you could find what was hot on the web at any one time. Nobody really showed any interest in it though.
Reason... I didnt want to pony up the money to put a live version on the web due to not knowing how the producers of the RSS feeds would fee. So there was never anything more then a demo concept.
Its somewhat discontinued. I may spin it up again someday, as everything is there minus the database with data. If I ever do, I will post it on HN for people to have a look.
EDIT - I will have a go at spinning it up tonight actually. It should be pretty easy to do in theory.
Chicken/egg problem with reaching critical mass. My plan was/is to grow it organically with long tail keywords once Google starts indexing all the pages. But they haven't done that yet because the site doesn't have enough incoming links to warrant indexing 1000 pages (another chicken/egg problem :)
Wow, it's as if I wrote those few sentences :) I totally feel you on the chicken/egg problem. It's definitely a big hurdle for any kind of social web app these days.
1. The entire http://www.choip.me website, I built it because I was sick of seeing ads for twitter scams on other tweet longer sites, so I just threw together a Twitter + Disqus mashup on appengine to do the same thing, and provide a better way to take discussions "offline" on Twitter. Not bad for basically a weekend project I think.
I just built a site for the CrossFit gym that I go to that allows members to track the results, flag various milestones, make easy comparison to previous workouts and comment on other people's results.
They initially loved it, but when they found out it couldn't be integrated into their Wordpress blog, they dismissed the completed project. So I guess the reason for its failure was lack of input.
The project didn't take that long to create and was made to be more of an advertising tool for my company.
http://crossfitter.ca (although you can't see that much unless you belong to a signed up gym)
Thanks for the extensive post. It sounds like you were really passionate about this website, but got a little carried away creating pet features you yourself would want. Great cautionary tale. At least you have a great portfolio piece, though!
I always wanted a site like this to discuss software process things without the hardcore evangelists using buzzwords. It didn't take too long to throw this up so it wasn't a massive waste but I actually thought it would start growing once I shared it with my developer/agile network. Not much interest, apparently. I'll probably have to kill it soon so it doesn't sit there mocking me.
I built a social networking site by myself with real time chat, messaging, photo sharing, music sharing, users can post wall messages, display their public timeline tweets, create friends list. I think the reason it didn't take off is the lack of money in advertisement. I tried Google adwords but the most I spent is 50 bucks and kind of short of it. The site is http://www.jamafriend.com
I built an events search that aggregated data from several sources - upcoming, last.fm, etc. It didn't work out, mostly because even with multiple sources of events and a lot of data massaging, it was hard to get more than a page of results for any location / topic. At its best, it would just show a page of random results for a givne location, which was probably what it should have been in the first place (an aggregate calendar).
Pulling live ebay auctions to match with regular price comparison. It seems that the most effective way to improve conversions on a price comparison site seems to be just to put relevant links to merchant sites front and centre on the landing page, the majority of people coming from Google don't care what fancy value add features you have created.
Freelance work btw, I don't run a affiliate marketing site myself.
I've got a personal todo application that's aimed for lazy people. I've seriously tried a dozen of "smart todo", and no one were good for me. The one I built is special because it is so simple, flexible, and it does more than what a paper agenda can do.
I could publish it but I would need to modify lots of thing to make it intuitive for new users, write docs, and basically just to make it "public".
> I could publish it but I would need to modify lots of thing to make it intuitive for new users, write docs, and basically just to make it "public".
None of those sound like prerequisites for publishing something. Is the functionality there, and is the tool modestly resistant to things like SQL injection? If so, why not put a link out there (like, say, in this thread)?
I built a Twitter client that filters out everything in your feed except for Tweets including urls or photos. It's pretty good way of just finding the interesting stuff in your Twitter feed.
That's rather good. I (long ago in the dark ages of the 90s) built something very similar to twitter and included the ability to see just URLs from posts. I wish they'd do the same thing.
Supported the entire 3GPP2-A10/A11 protocol for my product called Unsniff based on one customer's strong demand. One day my customer contact mysteriously disappeared and no one has used this feature ever since. That hurt.
I'm really enjoying this site. You should improve the permalink feature though. I want to share some of these comparisons with friends, but its not very easy right now.
I've encountered this numerous times with charting data for others. I find a great top level view of some key data, but it flies over their head and it never gets used.
This is probably our failure, not theirs. We can't expect our audiences to understand something the way we understand it.
Definitely, the key is to see things the way the users do, and provide only what they think they want to know. Seems like I'm stating the obvious, but doing the opposite is easier than it seems.
our app allows users to interact (create reminders via natural language) through email. I added in a feature/easter egg that lets the user start any email with @answer, followed by a question. Instead of reminder being added to our system, they are sent back the answer to the question. Uses natural language recognition
Recently deprecated http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537634(VS.85).aspx
Ironically now showing up in other browsers own extensions.
Reasons for failure:
* distrust of Microsoft inventions in the browser
* incomplete implementation strategy based on javascript instead of custom expression parser
* security issues because of using javascript instead of a custom expression parser