Brilliant But Cancelled

tasting notes

We can all relate to the idea of the brilliant TV show canceled before its expiration date. Oh blast the network executives that don’t give shows their room to grow and the audience to come. But isn’t that the fun of them too… the cult classic, the sleeper hit.

However, it doesn’t exactly work this way for the world of web. No other medium is so integrated into the audience experience. There are brilliant ideas out there everywhere, but they are wasted and fade away because the community never comes to join them, because the web master never has the avid audience to inspire them to continue. One of my favorite “brilliant but cancelled” websites has been Disturbing Auctions, a site that helped to catalog and put hilarious commentary on Ebay’s weirdest auctions. But unfortunately, the site never turned into more than a hobby for the web master and never gathered a big enough audience to switch it over into the amazing web 2.0 comedy site it could of been.

A list of other web deaths resides here: an Internet graveyard.

So, what websites of today are the e-gravestones of tomorrow? In the sea of Web 2.0 betas dependent completely on user adoption and generated content, who will survive and who will become buried under the waves. And to think for every few sites that even make it to beta, a dozen died before making it through development. I’d love to see Mashable start an obituary report of all the betas it announced in its days that never came to fruition. Farewell, good idea, good execution, but no one in the forest to hear it make a sound when it fell.

I’d love to hear from other people about their most memorable web sites that have come and gone and never got the chance they deserved.

suggested pairings

• Another weird site of web past: Potatoland.org
• 15 Lamentably Lost One-Season TV Wonders