Why did RememberYourFriends fail?
http://rememberyourfriends.com/10th of September 2006
I've emailed three friends about RememberYourFriends asking them what they think. The response has been the same from everyone: "brilliant!", "clever idea", "could be a big success", etc.
But none of them actually signed up. Why??!!
RememberYourFriends.com is a reminder app that periodically reminds you to keep in touch with your distant friends. The idea came from the fact that I needed something like this for myself and thought it could be a good excuse to try some new web app techniques. It's fully web 2.0 compliant except for the lack of a shiny web 2.0 logo.
I thought it was going to be a huge success and become an interesting challange to maintain that enormous amount of email traffic that it would generate. The site is built to withstand about 1,000 requests per second but when I allowed digg.com and reddit.com to know about the site I think it collected about 3 thumbs-up across both of those news sites. Why??!!
For example the invite-sender. I put a lot of thought into that and made it extremely user-friendly (I'd like to believe) but since the feature has been available (about 3 months) only 2 single invites have been sent among the 16 registered users. Why??!!
Another thing was the fact that you really didn't have to worry about yet another password. RememberYourFriends.com has passkeys that you can log yourself in with but you rarely ever need it because you're logged in with a cookie and if you do sign out or clear your browsers cookies, you can just click any of the links in the last email sent to you which has the passkey embedded within the URL.
I'm fed up with it now. I'm not going to take it down but I won't continue to spend any more time on it other that maintenance. It's quite humiliating actually. Not for the time I've waste on it but because of the best effort I've put into it and yet it doesn't succeed. I must be doing something wrong. What??!!
Actually, one last attempt to regain my confidence, have a look at the site: http://rememberyourfriends.com/ and then return here to post a comment about why you didn't sign up either. Thanks.