VoSnap: An Overnight Delivery Of Fail

Ted / 10.Jul.2007

Okay, let's take 70 Web 2.0 developers, put them all in a room for 48 hours, and have them make a startup. Yup, no potential problems here. Business as usual for the Ajaxified circlejerk.

Believe it or not, this was actually the goal of a recent failure festival called "Startup Weekend". It was run by the slave drivers at TechStars, which is an incubator like YCombinator except without a guy who used to be marginally relevant like 20 years ago.

How could they ever expect this to be a success with so many people? 70 isn't even a power of 2! You call yourselves nerds.

So What Did 70 Developers Come Up With?

Does it even matter? Well okay, I'll humor you with the idea. Here's how they described it:

VoSnap is a social voting tool that reduces time wasted on decision-making, makes sure everyone in the group has a voice, and gives instant feedback on fun or serious decisions. Users can create a poll, send it to their friends to vote on, and receive the results via cell phone SMS text or e-mail.

What the shit? So, you do polls over text messaging and e-mail. This is original....how? Decision making sure is a waste of time, though. Deciding what kind of pizza you want. Deciding whether or not to have another drink. Deciding if you should kill the moment and go out to buy condoms or just bareback it. These are all things that require the input of your peers, and if VoSnap had actually launched, you would have had the help you needed. Instead, they failed, and now you have herpes. Congratulations.

The Brutal Realization That Nobody Cares

They kept a blog about this trainwreck, and the final entry is very telling, not only of VoSnap, but of Web 2.0 in general. Here's what they said:

...the dev team turned in their best effort, and called it a weekend. By then, though, the sysadmins and people who knew how to deploy this thing had gone home. They all had day jobs today to get to. So they had no ability to push the project to the production servers.

Yes, that's right. They hacked out something that sort of worked, then realized that nobody cared enough to deploy it. They all had jobs. Yeah, Ajax is cute, but it doesn't pay the rent.

And What Did We Learn?

I didn't learn anything because I suffer from a condition known as common sense. I'm guessing that the 70 developers didn't learn anything, either. They're like a bird flying into a window - it never learns because every time it fails, it gets more and more brain damaged. The situation only gets worse.

That is, until the bird finally breaks its neck.

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10 Comments

Sounds slightly, very slightly related to what we are working on. On a side note: Here is a site up to snuff for your type of write up: yapta.com It deserves a good a-whackin' and got some minor love over at TC. So was the webjackhole guy one of you trying to create a situation or trying to open up another avenue? ;)
Nayberz nayberz / 10.Jul.2007 at 12:31pm
No - I have no idea who the webjackhole douchebag was, but he's gone now. FAIL.
Ted ted / 10.Jul.2007 at 12:34pm
I wonder where do you find all this funny pictures!!!!
visitor visitor / 10.Jul.2007 at 12:37pm
Wow VoSnap, what a catchy name! I wish I could try it, decision-making being so burdensome and all.
Paul paul / 10.Jul.2007 at 12:43pm
Bullshit like this is supposed to get whatever crap they're working on a lot of publicity, except they don't realize what they're getting instead is a lot of morbid curiosity.
philcollins philcollins / 10.Jul.2007 at 08:30pm
But hey, they got some animated banner ads!
Joel joel / 10.Jul.2007 at 10:00pm
I think the comment from the live video coverage (??) (http://ustream.tv/channel/startup-weekend) says it all """ by daman 3 days ago U GUYS HAVE SOME SERIOUS POTENTIOL! """"
nickg nickg / 11.Jul.2007 at 02:36am
this blog gets more legit every weekday
drew drew / 11.Jul.2007 at 04:41am
70 people and nobody could use a ssh client or FTP the 4 megs worth of content somewhere accessible?
ndizzle ndizzle / 13.Jul.2007 at 07:11pm
"70 people and nobody could use a ssh client or FTP the 4 megs worth of content somewhere accessible?" Hey man, in web 2.0 developers have discovered mark to market accounting. They simply book "cool" and "impressive" as revenue. The formula's kind of complicated, but the basic rate of exchange is one gradient on-screen object for one USD.
On-On on-on / 15.Jul.2007 at 03:24pm

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