Diana recently started going to a site called Ravelry, which is a site for knitting freaks. I think I first heard about it from Kristin, actually. It's so popular that they're metering in new members to keep up with the load.
The husband of the spousal Web team in play made a blog post about their traffic. Yeah, you're looking at 47 million page views. 47 million! Unreal!
I respect anyone who does their own home-grown Web app and people find it useful. The respect them even more when it's something that they also personally care about. I'm a little jealous that I haven't come up with such a thing myself.
Naturally this causes me to look at what I am interested in, and what I'd like to do. The truth is that I am doing a new project that, with any luck, could be up within a month or so. It has a potential audience of 42 million. It will compete with established players who don't do it as well, but frankly I'd be happy to take on 2% of that group.
Ironically enough, on a day where Federated Media sent some very good business my way, I'm starting to feel like CoasterBuzz is dying a slow death. Its eighth birthday past last week, and I forgot. It has become the step-child I've neglected for too long, and frankly I'm embarrassed by that. Traffic isn't on the decline, but it is starting to slip. And worse, I'm not sure how long I can continue to serve such a small niche with my own interest in the subject constantly up and down.
Regardless of the tone, I'm actually quite invigorated by the thought of doing the new stuff, and eventually getting back to CB. The forum is getting closer every day to something I'm really proud of, and that's such a great base to jump from. There are positive things to act on right in front of me.
I don't know what it deserves though. I don't need people to tell me it's out of date. I've been saying that for years. It can't be modified as is. It's too fragile. Wholesale replacement is the only option, and that's a lot of work.
We'll see how I feel about it after my other project launches.
No, I get that one minute you're saying you do, but then the next you're saying you don't. But regardless of if you want to or not, if you do want to do the work, it might be helpful to look elsewhere for inspiration.
You're always talking about how you wish you'd thought of this or that, but all I've read is that you came up with this or that afterwards, or that you came up with something someone implemented before you did because you didn't think it would 'catch on'. Why wait to see if it catches on? Isn't that how people invent in the first place?
Especially since all you're doing at this point is spending time, as you've already spent enough money on programs, etc. You should be trying to think ahead and actually putting those thoughts to use instead of going "Well, I don't see the point in doing this for X number of reasons".
Because everyone else is just doing the work, and even if their community isn't growing (which would change if you decide not to do the work and everyone eventually leaves Buzz for Updated Pastures), they're far out pacing Buzz in non-user generated content and bells and whistles that actually bring people in.