I was pondering all the half baked web site ideas I have had over the past few years and realized that I have launched a bunch of websites, 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...
Msgpro - Silly service which required installation of a toolbar (IE only) for users to send quick emails from the browser. It worked, but there really wasn't any point. Canned. Some domain company is now squatting on the msgpro.com domain.
Surfarama - Obviously this is now my personal blog, but it started out circa 2001 as a site to distribute another 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 2001, and prior to the recent data meltdown 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 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 - 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 I worked great, but was soon superceded by the excellent WINKsite.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 have 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...
Rollup - 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.
Linkroll - Just Another Del.icio.us Ripoff
Feedform - Useful idea to make it easy for publishers to link to a 'formatted' version of their news feed...Poorly executed. Biggest problem was that it subverted the real feed url...led to 1clicksub.
1Clicksub - Much better idea to make it easy for readers to subscribe to your news feed. Simply a hosted version of Jason Broome's Quicksub.
Property-Calculator - Just a nice collection of financial calculators for working out home loan repayments, refinancing options etc...I got real interested in this stuff when we brought our first house.
Delivr.net - Unique custom eCards based on images from Flickr licensed under the creative commons. Powered by the Flickr API.
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.
MyHitSpace.com - Free MySpace hit counter...just for kicks and giggles.
Hmmm...there may have been a couple of others, but I think that is basically it.
What's next? I've got a new secret site in the pipeline, which will launch later this week as part of the Contagious Media Showdown...still needs some work so hopefully I am not jinxing it by mentioning it now ;) I'll post here when it goes live.
Tell us what you think...