Failed Ideas and Projects.

Seth Godin asks: If you had 10 or 100 or 1000 domains each leading to a single idea, would your web presence feel the same? Would it be better?

This inspired me to create a list of URL's I have owned at one time with the idea of building them out into projects, companies, etc. Here's the list (in no particular order):

• revolveworks.com (also .net and .org) - a business some friends and I were going to start to create music stores that would allow customers to download songs and create their own mix cd's. This would have been around the time of Napster and we were trying to think of a way to monetize music in a new way. Clearly we underestimated the MP3 as a viable format unto itself. We never got the idea off the ground (for various reasons) and I let the domains expire after a year.
• birthvision.com - A concept company that a friend of mine and I were going to develop. More of an umbrella company than anything else. I gifted the domain to a friend who used it for his blog until he let it lapse.
• gettrendy.com - An online store I wanted to develop. I came up with great designs and even programmed the shopping cart, I wanted to sell t-shirts and things. I really wish I had pursued this more as this was years before threadless got started.
• blueigloo.org - At one time, this was my blog. I loved the name, but got annoyed that having a color in the domain name restricted the design of my site to always using blue. I gave it to a college kid who used it as his own blog for a few years,
• revous.com - A music blog that I operated with some friends for a time in the 2001-2002 timeframe. Mostly we blogged about trance and house music. We got bored with the music and with the site and after a year or two, I just shut it down.
• locolour.com - This was a portfolio site that I created for myself, probably around the 2001-2002 timeframe as well. I was actually quite proud of this site but it was soon out of date and as I wasn't really looking for a job or anything, the whole thing was pretty much frivoulous.
• nodist.net - Nodist = noticed. Based around one of my favorite things: plays on words. Intended to be a blogger network kind of like what 9Rules now is. This was around the time RSS was just coming into it's own (and before it was supported by Blogger, MovableType and everything else). I knew what I wanted to do with this, but had no idea how to do it. I let it languish for a little while, then handed this idea off to a friend who had a nice little system working, then it went away, I'm not sure why.

So, to answer Seth's question. I'd have to say yes. Looking over my list, several of those ideas could have become great things. And it's quite humbling to look over it now that it's been a few years. Why did I abandon so many of them? The simple answer is time. There's just never enough of it, especially when working fulltime. I think there were other things at play. It just wasn't as easy to build things on the web back then. There were no frameworks, no rubyonrails, dojo, etc. Most people were making their own frameworks or had tons of spaghetti PHP code. It's a heck of a lot easier now. Lastly, I just can't sit in front of a computer screen endlessly all day and night. Real life is more fun and rewarding.

The ideas still come. I have 2 or 3 good ones that still lack the time. Maybe, just maybe, they'll see the light of day.