our app allows users to interact (create reminders via natural language) through email. I added in a feature/easter egg that lets the user start any email with @answer, followed by a question. Instead of reminder being added to our system, they are sent back the answer to the question. Uses natural language recognition
Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
71–80 of 99 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#72The site http://www.soundsabitlike.com probably it's not visible enough on Google or it's just me who finds song similarities interesting :)
You're certainly not the only one; Pandora.com is based on that very premise.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#73Bread Crumb for Emacs, http://breadcrumbemacs.sourceforge.net . I use it constantly everyday as I built it for myself. Judging from the download stat, not many people using it.
Emacs already comes with functions for that.
pop-global-mark (C-x C-SPC) moves you around a global mark stack, and C-u set-mark-command (C-u C-SPC) does this locally in a buffer. (I use this hundreds of times a day.)
The bookmark package (go to "Bookmarks" in the Emacs info pages) give you persistent bookmarks, with a fairly nice interface.
I've written stuff in elisp only to find that it already existed in Emacs, too. Now, I usually check http://emacswiki.org first.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#74On http://www.ratemystudentrental.com, it was Watch Lists. If there was no available rental property that matched what you searched for, you could just hit a button to "create Watch List" and RMSR would notify you when a rental that met your criteria was added to the site or became available. Everyone thought this sounded like a "great idea" for the week or so it took me to build. Now 2 years later, exactly 2 people have ever used it.
Why did it go unused (I wouldn't say it totally failed)? The biggest reason is probably because no one wants to use your site as much as you want them to. If they couldn't find what they wanted on my site right away, why would they stick around when they could just go look elsewhere?
That's why I ended up building the "Around the Web" feature, where if a rental couldn't be found on RMSR, it will aggregate and map properties from other sites (around the web). This feature was mildly more successful.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#75I called it WorkSearch: http://www.linkup.com/worksearch/
Basically it is a timer for jobseekers that runs in the background, to push them to spend a longer amount of time hunting for a job than they normally would (even if it isn't on our site). People have always known that the biggest difficulty with job-hunting is spending enough time on it, but it is really demonstrated by the this 2009 NYTimes interactive graphic: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/31/business/20080...
Despite some bloggers writing about it (http://helpmegethired.wordpress.com/2009/06/), it never took off. I'd say the failure came from the execution. It needed to be dead-simple to turn on (w/o requiring an account), and always present yet unintrusive. Maybe the next version...
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#76http://www.thisistheonlyone.com Made a site in college to sell a T-shirt for $1,000,000. Didn't work. But I did make $40 off an MIT professor who bet me I wouldn't try it.
Maybe it didn't work because your site doesn't have any way to process payments? I wonder if Paypal imposes a per-transaction upper limit.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#77Supported the entire 3GPP2-A10/A11 protocol for my product called Unsniff based on one customer's strong demand. One day my customer contact mysteriously disappeared and no one has used this feature ever since. That hurt.
Lesson learnt !
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#78We spent months on an in depth analytics tool for our users. Most of them don't have an idea what the data means. It's over their heads, so we missed the mark audience wise.
I've encountered this numerous times with charting data for others. I find a great top level view of some key data, but it flies over their head and it never gets used.
This is probably our failure, not theirs. We can't expect our audiences to understand something the way we understand it.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#79At the risk of being contrary to the spirit of the thread: if no one uses it it's probably not a very good feature.
I'm not so sure, marketing has a lot to do with how many people use a product/feature
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#80I've got a personal todo application that's aimed for lazy people. I've seriously tried a dozen of "smart todo", and no one were good for me. The one I built is special because it is so simple, flexible, and it does more than what a paper agenda can do. I could publish it but I would need to modify lots of thing to make it intuitive for new users, write docs, and basically just to make it "public".
I'd be up for trying that if you want testers. I'm lazy and need a decent todo app.
Thanks for your interest. I can't publish it without some major tweaking but I'll work on them.