One of the first ideas I got in the last year was of building a  simple web notepad.  Therefore I created  not3s.net , which eventually became an easy-to-use though ugly RubyonRails cms. I quit developing it further when it struck me people will never get to use it on a large scale. There are plenty of web notepads out there, either as firefox plugins, as google apps or yahoo notepad websites. Not to mention draft web emails of blog posts.

The next on the list of ideas I got was to make an online rolodex . There is none out there that easily combines saving private data on your friends with sharing the public data with others or even sending remainders on their birthdays or other events. But there are PLENTY that do parts of this, in a better way. Google calendar, Yahoo calendar, etc. You name it.

Some other idea I spent a couple of weeks on was to build a website for ranking blogs and blog posts. A digg for blogs only, only in a cuter manner. This failed almost instantly after launch, since somebody pointed me to blogoree.ro, a digg-clone made using a free cms, having the same declared purpose.

Back to the drawing board. Next on my venture ideas was the one I mentioned on previous posts on this blog. A Google Local website targeted on Romania. The perfect idea for the moment, since there are fresh new high-res satellite photos of Romanian towns, but no local search engine combining them with a geolocation database(with addresses coordinates and the like). I still hope there are chances of success for it, but my enthusiasm is dropping by the hour. Indeed, there are some competitors in the area, there is not enough demand for this, and at any moment Google, Microsoft or Yahoo could jump right into the deal.

Anyway. These are my updates. I’m happy though to read I’m not the only one facing problems.  Paul Graham talks about one other case here. Refreshing.