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Projects are based on python and django.
Some of them are:
1 - A social job listing board. Users can submit their ads for seeking jobs, for employees, or about their services etc. My aim is to eliminate the sending cv and waiting for a possible reply or having to struggle gazillions of cvs or applications all stating that "the applicant is the best for that job" problems.
For that reason a dynamic questionairre system is provided where ad owners can ask applicants to write code samples, essays, or answer some specific questions to see if applicants fit their needs. I'm planning many other features, but need to get it online first. status: almost done, needs effort on design and bugfixes
2 - An open social bug filing system mostly for fun. you can file a bug on anything, on your girlfriend, on god, on your cell phone, on your drink etc. Bug reports are legit, though the content may not be :) status: almost done, needs some work on features and design.
3 - A soc^H^H^H community based recipe & question & answer system for web developers to improve their skills. The drill is that it provides a canvas based draw board where users can quickly come up with a mockup of layout of the elements and ask their questions, or provide sample css & html recipes on them. nothing big, but might be fun. status: mostly done, needs design and some more work on draw board, bugfixes.
4 - Awesomelist. A very old project, where users share information about the things they find awesome (or sucky?) in life which'll eventually build up a community(ha! no escape from communities). might already been implemented a gazillion times. status: uhm..uh.. don't remember where i left it.
5 - Pros & cons. Another old project. Listing page about the pros and cons on anything. Most probably this idea also has been exploited to death, but you know oldies are goldies. status: not really sure. i might have never started this.
So if anyone would like to team up with me on any of these projects, please drop me a line.
My projects are mostly based on features that are missing or misimplemented in the existing products. Some of the finished projects gone live, tried to sell some, some are rotting in the attic.
I lack visual design skills, but yet trying to do my best to provide a usable UI for the products. One of my motives in building a product against my lack of visual skills is knowing that "they started as crap too". For example reddit was just a very simple listing full with porn links, stumbleupon was just a "what is this" page for a few years, twitter was and still is damn slow, broken and overbloated and there are many more.. Other than reddit, others was most probably the first at doing what they do. There were no similar products, but they got it up and running and people easily adopted.
When i ask about feedbacks about my products, mostly i get "i didn't understand which problem you are solving". I even deployed a localized copy of cnprog as a forum on women's issues, to see if it was me doing it wrong in designing. I got the following feedback several times: "it's too complicated, there's no order, no title in threads, other forums(phpbb style) are better ". WTF? These people are on facebook 24/7, uploading gazillions of photos, messaging their friends each second. They know what tagging is, and still a stackoverflow clone is too complicated?
Anyway, what i wonder is, what happened to people that got it the first time when they saw reddit, stumbleupon and said "yeah i'll use it". Were internet users back in late 90's , ealy 2000's much more sophisticated people? What has changed since then, and people became website gourmets to say that "you should tell what this site is about on the first page. i don't understand that your site is a listing site by just looking at the listing on the goddamn first page. that's why i decided that i won't use it at the very first second i stumbled onto your site"? Sigh..
Have "they" gone forever, and will never come back again?
Edit: Thanks for all the fantastic comments, i didn't expect to get many insightful ideas and suggestions. There are some points i guess i need to make myself clear:
- WTF -> these people can use the applications i can not even cope with, how can they find a 2-3 step forum complex ? details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1838852
- I've tried opening jobs on amazon, asking communities for feedbacks, paying google ads, using stumbleupon ads, posting to startup listings. lastly using feedbackroulette :) by the way fr is just great.
- details about a few of the stuff i've done http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1838805
I've asked your opinions/reviews on Visitrs (http://www.visitrs.com) before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=957163 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=736929
Since then i've made some changes to make it more a website based social application than a simple chat system. It is more like a socialized delicious, and an interactive stumbleupon. Yet it's being developed in the background, but i guess it's time get to get some insightful views, if you don't mind :)
Features being developed are browser extensions, follow/ignore mechanism, external authentication such as twitter&fb, and some more fixes, additions.
If anyone wonders about the software stuff: Visitrs runs on Django and mongodb interfaced with mongokit, uses xapian for indexing, ejabberd + strophe.js for chat system, memcached, and finally mootools.
Thanks
Anyway. Finding a domain name for my latest "next big things" is the hardest part of the projects.
Looking at monster.com, omegle.com, amazon.com i.e. names are not related to the content.
So i wonder if i chose some bogus or completely irrelevant name for my -say- joblisting site, would it affect the success in any way? Of course the shorter/the sweeter/the nicer/the easier the better, but they don't exist out in the wild anymore :)
thanks