9 years ago from Jeff Domke, Chief Product Officer @ CompStak
Who has a startup, product or project that you poured your heart and soul into, and loved, and then it died?
Could have been death by client, metrics, finances, etc... what killed it?
I really miss Google Reader, even though it wasn't mine. My RSS experience hasn't fully recovered since it died.
Feedly works fine. Their mobile app is stellar; in fact i prefer it to the actual desktop site.
The feeds on desktop are a little buggy when running in chrome (at least on my machines), and there are a few things I wish were moved around on the UI. Despite that it's not a bad product especially compared to Greader.
I've been a pretty big fan of fever since GReader's death.
i was a fan of fever, but use readkit now.
Try inoreader !
Same here. I really loved GR.The only feed manager/reader I could live with after GR died is Digg Reader. It's simple and fast.
GoRead is my current feedreader. Recommendable.
Readmill. Not quite dead yet, but soon I guess.
"Not quite dead"? They are closing on july 1st : (
I'll miss them a lot... :_(
I miss Google Wave.
I never really used it, but a friend showed me his workflow with it and it seemed so perfect. I feel like we're just getting that experience back with Slack and its integrations.
there is no need to miss it! Google donated a big chunk of the wave project code to apache and they have it up and running https://incubator.apache.org/wave/demo-servers.html
Wooo, awesome! I knew the project went source code, but didn't know it was under active development.
Thanks for the heads up :D
Even though I wasn't involved in it, I always loved Gowalla. (Somebody had to bring it up!)
I'm trying to learn iOS dev so I can finally build something like it. Something to track my travel adventures!
Gowalla was awesome. Was so much better than foursquare for a while!
Ah, then I have some good news for you: A few of the Gowalla guys are picking up where they left!
Yea, I really excited for that one! Now we just need Tim Van Damme to join the group and it will be Gowalla team again.
Gowalla really felt special. Foursquare felt like a numbers game with a leaderboard, and Gowalla made me want to go exploring. Bah.
I felt the same way. Oh, and those badges. I loved them so much!
Gowalla is something I mourn weekly. It felt like I was chronicling my travels instead of racing for points.
When I was in Cincinnati there were a bunch of active users that built out some really cool trips around it - there was a local beer exploration one, and an underground railroad one... Man I miss that service.
Yea I really thought they would win out over Foursquare. Kudos to Foursquare, they did a great job. I felt that they were two different products but I guess they overlapped in many ways, hence people only stuck with one.
I'm currently using Foursquare to keep track of the places I've been to but now I'm worried that Foursquare might go out of business. That's why I'm feeling the need to learn iOS dev and create something myself so I don't get left in the cold. Haha
Geocities. I'm not sure I'd be lying if I said I owe my entire career to it.
Absolutely! Geocities was excellent. I think so many people got started just messing around with Geocities (myself included), and it was such a cool environment for learning and experimenting.
Audiogalaxy
wow had forgotten about that one!
This. It was such a well thought-out service, and way ahead of its time. After it was shut down (or rather converted into a streaming service), I had to settle for SoulSeek — but it was nowhere near as good.
ICQ and then, Winamp.
I miss my Winamp skins... searching for the perfect one was such an adventure.
I made my own one, but then returned to the old classic one.
Editorially. I mean, I didn't work on it, but I loved it : )
xanga .__.
Me too. Xanga was my adolescence, and when I discovered how to be emo.
Aldus Freehand, befor Macromedia bought it. I knew I was on a sinking ship as I saw Illustrator's rise to fame and ubiquity, but loved Freehand nonetheless.
Sparrow. Still living in ignorant bliss that push notifications will come for iOS.
I still use Sparrow as my main email app on my iMac and on iOS :/ I've tried literally every OSX email app that's been released since and not a single one compares. I'm just waiting for the day I can finally switch.
Mailbox is coming to OSX, maybe that day is soon.
That's true, but as long as it doesn't support all types of emails, I won't be able to use it. I have a lot of different email addresses (companies, personal, projects, etc) and most of them are custom domains/IMAP.
Mailbox, so far, only supports gmail (and iCloud) email addresses, which is why I can't use the iOS version right now. Just waiting for that update!
Man, what an app this was. I used to recommend this thing like my son made it in art class or something.
The way it used to be at least. Got me through a lot of days. Sometimes I feel like my music is so sterilized now with spotify, no mixes etc.
The old Myspace. Only because I was so lame.
Weejay.
A (free) social jukebox for bars and restaurants. It was wonderful, I WANTED to use it, and one of the best apps I've ever design. It was even starting to gain traction. Died because the founder got cold feet and decided getting married and taking a safe job made more sense.
App that wasn't mine? Catch.
It was a note taking app, acquired by Apple last year. Somewhat of an Evernote competitor.
A coworker and I used it constantly to remember app/product ideas together. You could create a shared notebook, and it worked quite well. My girlfriend and I also used it to share/plan date ideas. Thinking about making my own version.
I did a lot of design work for Catch, thanks for making my day. :)
catch was awesome... i miss it as well. This thread is making me sad.. I've lost so much.
If I loose slack -- i dunno what i'll do.
Microsoft Encarta. Versions 2000-2003 had the perfect flat design. What killed it!?
There's a very small website called Wikipedia or something.
I loved Encarta too, it's interesting looking back at the UI: http://img.clubic.com/00093114-photo-ms-encarta-2005-5.jpg
If it was free, and anyone can edit it, maybe we still have it.
The best part about Encarta was the MindMaze trivia game built into it.
A few years ago (2010-ish) I was working on a dashboard that integrated a bunch of common social media & web services and organized it by type of data instead of service to make it easier to handle massive multitasking.
I rolled off because clients were too hard to work with - project ended up getting completely bastardized, but it actually still lives on at hubbley.com - don't judge me, I had nothing to do with the current Frankenstein.
I feel you. When I ask people about this, the "don't judge me" thing is really common.
Most of the time you rather it just died than a bunch of other people mess with it and turn it into a Frankenstein.
Exactly, but it is fun to go down memory lane from time to time. Something like this thread could be an offshoot of clients from hell - projects that went to hell with before and after photos :)
A long time ago, we built a prototype of a service that was essentially the same as polarb now (except that it was aimed at the most casual user), along with a supercool mascot. What's left of it is this splash page I've made: http://dilemmo.com/
RIP
That poor mascot...he has to fake that smile for all of eternity. Knowing full well that he will never be ready.
I agree. Your mascot is beautiful. But dead. A beautiful zombie mascot.
Glad you guys like poor ol' Dilemmo. Here's him in action (courtesy of our talented illustrator Jelena):
I designed a pretty cool dashboard that I was really proud of when I worked at Apple Retail, it had all sorts of cool stuff displayed on it, but for obvious reasons when I left Apple I had to leave the project behind too.
I know what you are talking about. Very nice work!
Is this only for apple store employees? Or is it possible to give us a link? Or will Apple's SWAT team kick in your door?
Gowalla. Awesome mascot. Great icons and badges. Beautiful design.
Gaah... I started a blog once a few years back called UndeadBlogs.com, which was supposed to be a roundup of the best blogs that lost their steam. Of course, I never kept up with it.
I really liked Lala at the time. I'm extremely happy with Rdio now though.
I loved Lala back then, too. It "just worked", which is more than I can say for iTunes Match.
Not my product, but Dreamcast! Awesomely innovate platform on so many levels.
Years ago, I designed a sort of music distribution platform/CMS that enabled independent musicians to create and customize their own 'professional' websites and iOS apps, through which they could sell their music and earn 100% of the proceeds (vs. iTunes' 60%+ or whatever it is these days). The project began well before similar (though significantly less robust) platforms like Bandcamp, but eventually went under because the founder was bootstrapping (so as to keep the platform completely independent) and didn't move to a paid subscription model until it was too late.
+1 for Dreamcast.
iCAST.
Death by an insane burn-rate and being about 5 years ahead of it's time. The growth of broadband happened a few years too late.
I think it was called "Iheartsandy.com" it's was like a virtual assistant service you could text/email/etc in plain text and it would remind you. I loved it... some company bought it and shut it down...
I remember playing with that service — I Want Sandy. It also had the ability to set reminders/to do's etc. through the voice service Jott, which now makes it seem kind of prescient given Siri, etc.
http://www.mymoneyblog.com/sandy-and-jott-create-your-own-free-virtual-assistant.html
yes! that was the name. It was great. I miss it.
I loved this service.
I had a fun project I launched several years ago called Sportsify
http://cl.ly/image/1r0g333x3M2b
It did 2 things: aggregated sports sites' win or lose projections for upcoming NCAA & NFL football games, so in this screenshot 88% of the sports sites had picked the Saints to beat the Vikings. And it took all the weekly NFL, NBA, etc. power rankings from around the web and aggregated them into a definitive "uber ranking".
Got too hard to keep up with the site scraping, especially since I never saw a way for it to really make money.
Also abandoned an app a couple years ago called FlickPredict
http://cl.ly/image/3X2F0d2m3j1F
My friends and I often predict what the Rotten Tomatoes scores of upcoming movies will be. I wanted to make an app that captured this, but the logistics of it get pretty hard once you start trying to actually build it, especially since RT scores come out at all different times.
TimeSquare
An App that let's you book anything... Restaurant, Conferences, Bowling, Hockey, Football, Gym, Sauna.. Everything with a design pattern nearly as Vine has. I had to quit it because of financial difficulty.
Now I'm running cooler ideas! named Blooox and Anview.
Mine was Capsule: a web/mobile digital time capsule.
We couldn't get product market fit or investment... then all the founders couldn't agree on how to move forward and we split... now its dead.
Did you work on this w Marcus Skala? If so, I tested for you. It was fun while it lasted.
Heh, I'm working on something VERY similar to this rn.
Everpix. I migrated to PictureLife but it's just not the same.
iGoogle.
Sparrow — http://sparrowmailapp.com/
Bought by Google and development was shutdown. I still use it today as I haven't found a comparable replacement.
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