Projects
I love building web sites and services, and have launched a bunch over the last 5-6 years, some which worked and some which didn’t…here’s a quick list (as much for my own reference), roughly in order of their appearance…
Surfarama.com - Obviously this is now my personal blog, but it started out late 2002 as a site to distribute a toolbar which allowed users to search on DayPop, which was the orginal blog search engine (since dropped off the radar it seems). Not only that but it used the DayPop RSS feeds to automatically update the toolbar to display the DayPop Top News and Blog posts. Anil Dash even linked to it early on and commented that it ’showed promise’. I was stoked, but not stoked enough to keep it up. Truth is it was a bit flaky and other options soon appeared, and it didn’t seem like a useful thing anymore.
Blogarama - Started around 2003 and grew into one of the bigger independant blog directories. Nothing fancy, but it gets a boat load of traffic. I sold it sometime back in late 2002 (or early 2003) to a chap in the UK, Colin, who has improved the back end a lot, made it pretty, and commericalized it somewhat.
Blogpatrol - Launched shortly after Blogarama, BlogPatrol is a simple web stats service for bloggers and building on the traffic from Blogarama it got off to a good start. I had a few problems with stability until I forked out and finally rented my first dedicated box. By the time I sold it there were around 4-5,000 users, and there are now 18,000+. The user with the most traffic at the time I sold it was Megan Morrone of TechTV fame.
Waproll.com - I was riding the bus to and from work when we were in Houston (2001-2004) and wanted to read my news feeds on my phone (T610 at the time), so created WAProll, which aggregated about 150 popular RSS feeds and converted them to WAP. I worked great, but was soon superceded by the excellent WINKsite. I actually had a few conversations with the guy from WINKsite, and it was clear they were building out all the functionality I wanted and blending it with some other cool mobile community features so there was no point in continuing with the experiment. It did have quite a few regular users for the short time it was around.
Blogpoll - Blogpoll was going to be a grand social experiment. The idea was to create online surveys of general public interest and use the blogosphere to syndicate them so that a wide sample of people could be polled and interesting data collated and made available for anyone who wanted it. Still reckon that would be a cool idea and I have recently been pondering this again with the recent talk of structured blogging which opens all sorts of interesting possibilities. However, as it happened at the time (early 2003ish) I didn’t have the time or savy to jump start the community side of things. The site was all built out (I still have a license for the excellent phpQ which was powering the survey engine), but it got no real traction. And as a result it became a much humbler simple poll builder…and in this form it has been reasonably successful. I sold the site in 2003/2004 sometime and I notice now that it is still going strong with nearly 3000 active polls.
Cardfile - Cardfile was intended to be a simple way to keep your contacts up to date…sort of a Plaxo but much simpler. The idea is users create a profile (with public and private levels) and then invite their contacts to subscribe to either their public or private profile. Subscribers can then get updates (and birthday remiders) via email or RSS. And there were a bunch of other features to manage your contact list, and it also had downloadable vCards etc. Actually writing this up I wish I still owned the site, because I still think it could work…nevermind. I sold the site to a Canadian guy and it looks like he has added various levels of free and paid membership, but it otherwise seems to have gone somewhat stale.
Feedroll - Feedroll works great and has been very popular. I had to periodically disable the ability for users to define their own feeds just to manage down the load on the server. Feedroll serves millions of feeds every month and led to FeedrollPro…I sold both sites to a Dutch company in 2006.
Rollup.org - Simple web based news aggregator started before Bloglines even, but never had any of the great features of Bloglines. Actually it was more like a hosted version of Planet, enabling users to set up a public aggregator for as many as 40 different feeds. It worked pretty well for the most part, but I was troubled by the ‘business model’ question…not that it was ever going to be a commercial sucess, but it really needed to be on its own box and to support itself needed to carry advertising (or something). I didn’t want to get off side with publishers so decided to close it down. At that point it was hosting 600 odd users.
FeedrollPro - Grew from Feedroll. Lots of publishers wanted to offer their feeds for ad free syndication by other sites, and be able to track click throughs etc. FeedrollPro meets these needs. Technically it is an improvement over Feedroll in many ways, and provides a bunch of feed management and stats tracking features besides. It is growing steadily. Sold in 2006.
Linkroll - Just Another Del.icio.us Ripoff (since sold)
Delivr.net - Unique custom eCards based on images from Flickr licensed under the creative commons. Powered by the Flickr API. I launched Delivr orginally as an entry in the Eyebeam Contagious Media Showdown which was a competition to see whocould get the most traffic from a standing start over three weeks. Delivr stayed the top 10 entries (out of about 200) for most of the comp, but dropped off to about 18th by the end, out done by some very funny and viral things which got picked up by some popular sites like collegehumour and fark. Goodfun, and I was contacted by a journalist who was doing a piece on the comp and commented that Delivr was the only entry he saw that was actually useful!..just not funny or viral enough, nevermind.
FeedHoster.com - We based RSS management solution. There’s others out there, but FeedHoster distinguished itself by enabling serialized RSS feeds, ie. feeds that spit out items in a defined order regardless of when a reader first subscribes…perfect for syndicating fiction and the like. I set up a demo using Cory Doctorows excellent book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and after getting BoingBoing’d there were over 600 subscribers and even when they all finished the book there were new subscribers all the time and a steady 200 at any one moment. I was stoked, particularly cause Cory Doctorow himself liked it. I sold the site sometime in late 2005.
Publi.sh - I love this site. It’s a free RSS builder, which some great features like full WYSIWYG post editor and post by email. For some reason it never really got much traction under my mgmt, so I sold it to some dude on Sitepoint in Q1 2006. No idea how it’s going now, but I reckon it’s time will come. And I really do rue giving up the domain name, how cool is that.
Tagalyzer.com - An experiment with the Yahoo! content analysis API. Just link to it and anytime someone clicks through it will present related content based on a content analysis of the referring page. It hasn’t been very successful because there is a difference between the keywords that Yahoo! thinks is important and what a human might, which is interesting really when you think about the what this might mean for the relevancy of Yahoo! search results?! Currently on hiatus…maybe I’ll get back to it one day.
Questions.co.nz - Deceptively simple Q&A site for people with questions about New Zealand. Hasn’t really taken off, maybe I should relaunch it as an open agony column where you can post your agony questions and get answers from random people…that could be quite funny :) - Currently on Hiatus while I focus on Schoolworking (see below).
TradeBook - My first Facebook application, let’s you display your Trade Me auction listings on your Facebook profile. Trade Me is New Zealand’s answer to eBay.
Schoolworking - As of right now (Feb ‘08) Schoolworking is my current afterhours web project. The site itself is a social Q&A site for students to help each other with their schoolwork. Practically it is a cross between a forum and a multi-user blog with social features borrowed from Facebook and Twitter to make it more fun. I am also working on a version of the same application more focussed on the blog post/comment paradigm so that will be interesting also…the idea is the application could be usefully employed in any number of different niches, eg. a multi-user blog for a local geographic community, or a community of interest, or a social Q & A for any number of different topics.