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Ask YC: Projects that inspire you
29 points by robmnl on June 12, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 34 comments
Hi YCers,

Sometimes I stumble upon projects / startups really excite me.

Years ago, I was really excited about del.icio.us: so clean, so nicely developed. Now it's been overrun a bit, quality has gone down.

Today I stumbled upon http://weewar.com - So NICE! Well developed, so clean, just sexy.

I'd like to know, what are startups out there that really inspire you, that are really just the cream of the crop - the small little % of stuff that really matters to you?

I've been doing my own startup, and I can't say it has fulfilled me. I'm in a process of turning it around, asking myself what I really care about, what really inspires me. That's why I wanted to check with you guys / girls, what really inspires you.

Thanks, Rob



In terms of sheer inspiration, I'm not sure startups are what do it for me. Stuff like the mars probes is what I want to stand up and cheer for.


/signed

great strides in general science and math inspire me more than startup companies. space travel, deep ocean exploration, etc..

i'm a fans of some startups, but i don't think thats the same as inspiration.

the only exception, i think, is the inspirational kick in the pants you get when someone sells their company and gets rich or reaps some other type of reward/recognition and you think to yourself "i thought of that three years ago!" or somesuch. really makes you want to get out there and innovate.


http://wufoo.com/

http://www.weebly.com/

http://geticeberg.com/

http://wordpress.com/

All sites that let the user build something of his own. I've always been fascinated by this approach.

All very clever and very cool.

(Now all we need is a site that lets the user build a site that lets his user build a something of his own.)


I think that can be done with heroku.

http://heroku.com


Seconded, I love wufoos design. I needed to set up a simple form for http://facebookcontest.com/contact.html and wufoo just flowed.


http://www.tinyurl.com

They're not really a startup since they only accept donations, but I loved the idea so much I made my own version which does not randomly assign a string but instead allows users to pick their own phrase: http://www.oneryng.com


You may want to disallow reassignment, or at least detect circular assignments.


Disallowing reassignment would leave a finite amount of (useful) keyphrases; my business model is to charge for people who wanted to keep their keyphrases for a duration of time.

Maybe I should make that more clear...

Detecting circular assignments is a great idea though, thanks!


Isn't that what DNS is for?

I wish you luck, but I can't help thinking rickrolling, goatseing, and spamming other people's links will be a problem.


Yeah, it's an amazingly useful service.. Love it too.

Nice work on oneryng.. At least reveal the meaning of life though if you know it..


I really like http://37signals.com business model. for me the basic thing that inspire me will the how the business model uniqueness :)


I have to say its not the project which inspires me. Its the people behind the project.

That being said I do enjoy reading about facebook progress in the world, quite inspirational.


I just spent 5 minutes of my life on http://littlegreatideas.com/willyou/index.php

A good one I found today was http://www.zoomii.ca

Sometimes if I've been working on facebook apps for a while I'll go back to my own site and smile.


http://www.plurk.com/

Why? Because they have a service that exists in a field that is hopelessly dominated by a single competitor (twitter). But they think they can do it anyways, and in many ways have created a superior product.


http://www.unfuddle.com

They have an amazing product and keep adding new features (e.g. recently added git support!). Awsome customer service, a person responded to my feature suggestion within 12h.

Most importantly they have a good business model. Most startup's see a problem that needs solving and solve it with no regards to how to make money from it (ad revenue will not make you a millionarie unless your google!). They will ultimately fail. I like companies which actually have a little bit of business acumen and can actually find ways of making money from their product. 37signals is another company that does this well


I'm a big fan of MOO.com

They've got some really cool products and a really slick web site.

I sometimes use them as a reference for my own web apps, which is basically a nice way of saying I've stolen ideas from them before. :)


http://www.librarything.com Simple, narrow, single guy for a month (initially), subscription model from day one.


Go LibraryThing! I used to work there and Tim is, indeed, a very inspiring person.


http://blinksale.com has a clean, simple interface and a useful service, that also has great business model built in.

Flickr seems so obvious now that people forget how lame online photo sites were before it. Personally, at least for some time, Flickr made me invest more time and energy in taking better photos. It's naturally social, as opposed to glued on "social networking" features for many apps.


rememberthemilk.com is pure cream, pardon the pun. It's a perfect example of a tiny, talented team building something people want (and love), without any fuss.


http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=puns ;) I can't help but think of this when ever someone says "pardon the pun."


hilarious! +1 for you ;)


I really liked http://twistori.com/ very clean and sexy.


http://hellomynameise.com http://friendfeed.com , although I believe it solves a problem by slowly creating another (noise)

What I would really love today is an Intelligentsia. Something similar to a closed and secret community of smart people (which you find here) who share ideas, links,thoughts, solutions to our everyday problems. Think of it as a closed, secret invite only HN.


barbelith.com might suit your tastes. It's not invite-only, but if you apply then it takes months to get approved. Reasonably intelligent discussion occurs.


they exist, they're just hard to get invited to because they want to remain small.


Shaun Inman's http://haveamint.com is beautiful.


http://getsatisfaction.com

Because, I can get to learn what people like, dislike, want, need, cry for. It is Feedback 2.0

I am currently subscribed for few feeds for some products on my domain. Very informative.


http://www.anybots.com


www.everyblock.com

I can't wait to see how far they progress towards very ambitious goals. Definitely seems like they've got the team to succeed. Also can't wait until they roll out to other cities.


They've said that they would rather do a few cities very well than do a bunch of cities poorly. Also, one of the biggest obstacle is finding, getting permission to use, cleaning up, and publishing different datasets. This is much more of a social problem than technological, although it might improve when they have good reference implementations in their initial cities. Right now they have different datasets for each city because they take what data they can get.

The good news is that the journalism grant that funded them stipulated that they have to release their code at the end of the project, so when that comes, each city can make their own Everyblock if they have the will.


Using http://www.younoodle.com in early 2008 was as exciting as any site I used in years, simply because it was clean, functional, fast, responsive and most importantly allowed me to connect with people I was interested in and led to several meetups.

Web communities are great and all that, but as I get older (sound like an old man even though I am a twenty-something) I actually want to meet people, network, and have deeper more meaningful engagements (...ok ...real-world fun & parties ;) ).


For me, ironically, as it grows it is also starting to lose its lustre through mass adoption leading to lower quality and fewer connections... connectivity activity diluted? new joiners not so interested in engaging as observing? new joiners just joining because everyone else in their school/college is (...and YouNoodle just want mass membership)?

Hence the fact I am getting bored of it but that, however, seems to be true with most sites after the new-and-shiny phase passes.


OMeta: http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~awarth/ometa/

and the rest of VPRI's

"STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming"

q.G.




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