I got the link from my megalomaniac despot boss, Rob Lord.

Praise be to him.

The same concept (including the minimalism) applied to some kind of professional information/notification could be interesting.

Why would anyone pay for that service?

and aren’t peolpe tired with the .us domains?

They become more and more ridi.culo.us

personally I think this app is bo.dacio.us -especially for stalkers. Now if only they set it up to send me an sms when my ex dumps her current bea.us I think there’d be J.us/tice in the world!

Singlestat is a great, simple idea built by one guy in just a few days. I can certainly see this going viral based on the fee waiver.

I believe it’s actually called Single Status.

A website to tell you about what your friends are up to? Why not just ask?

How pathetic is this…? What does it say about a culture that needs to be instantly notified about the break up of a relationship, so you can “move in” and pick up the pieces?

I tend to agree with Kevin, but social reflections aside, it’s good to know that someone is using technology to care of the smaller things in life rather than trying to take over the world

I was right in the thick of the first dotcom fiasco. I was in London when I got the phone call that our San Mateo-based firm had just done an Olympic high dive-shaped curve on NASDAQ (my options when from seven figures to $15K in 6 weeks). Most of the stuff I see reviewed on this site is quite a bit more useless than the average dot-bomb of 7 years ago. At least this time the herd mentality seems to be confined to a relatively limited number of VC idiots.

As for me, I’ve moved back into far more traditional territory. Big old hairy vertical applications for the transportation industry. No Ajax. No Flash. No bullshit. Just boring stuff like ensuring cargo gets where it is supposed to go on time. No VCs are looking at us. But guess what? We’re profitable! Remember that word? We make a profit and we’re seeing slow, steady growth as we gradually add customers who take their time to test our software carefully and ensure that it meets a genuine business need.

All I can say to people who read this site: if you are in your early twenties go and talk to some of your elders if you want to avoid being chum when this new mini-boom inevitably goes down the toilet.

I’m with Chris. Here’s a tip. If you need a third party to find out about something significant in someone’s life, they’re probably not your friends.

I have always wanted to see an application like this. I looked up an old girfriend and she is now single… Great service.

I can see this site become popular. Now I can track so many girls.

@9: Huh?

Michael, thanks for posting this. I agree with the others who appreciate a breath of fresh air in an app that does one simple thing to make our lives easier.

Pathetic is one way to look at needing an automated e-mail system to remind us of friends’ statuses. However, as someone else mentioned this is potentially a spectacular networking tool, assuming that we can point this service to other fields in the myspace, and assuming that myspace contains members of the network we want to track.

Thanks! Hope to see more of these simple yet useful apps pop up.

I wrote this tool to make searching myspace easier…

http://www.whatstheprotocol.com/Myspace/

Once again, a simple, useless, business model-less site gets some techcrunch lovin’. Not taking a pot shot at the featured site, but where are the companies (companies, not sites!) that may actually do decent and have a business model behind them with structure, organization, and god forbid a real company backing them?

They’re the ones that could benefit from a feature, not some half assed attempt at… whatever it is this site (and other recent features) is attempting.

You guys are missing the point (or you don’t have hot friends.)

Another one of those, what exactly is the point again?

I also feel exactly like it’s bubble 1.0 all over again. Only with even more stupid applications this time.

If this service (as it is now) will fly, I promise to eat all of my hats.

Not much of a barrier to entry - interesting to see if myspace will kill it dead by doing the same thing.

Business model: $3.95 a user. There’s 80 million users on myspace, the overhead on this must be neglible, so this could work out quite well.

There’s one huuuuge difference between the dot.com bubble and now: back then, no-one had broadband and the ‘net was a just a “catalouge with pages which turn very slowly”. Now the market is larger, websites actually load in less than a minute, and people are much more comfortable with making transactions online.

If I were single and using MySpace to meet dates, I’d find the automated gossip of “guess who’s available again?!” irresistible. And so would many of my guy friends. Any social network that facilitates dating, but isn’t explicitly branded (like Match.com) for dating, could use this feature to boost their “mating traffic.”

Of course, this doesn’t mitigate the fact that this would be a pretty easy feature for MySpace to add on in some future set of site updates.

My project… http://www.datinganyone.com Same idea… but free. though closer to alpha

Jared,

You know David (Weekly) created this over the weekend as part of a contest and to just have fun, right?

Then again, that’s how PBWiki kinda started…

-david

Hehheheh. I wrote mine over finals the first week in May. I think it’s important to put an age filter in there. Any discussion of myspace seems to lead invariably to the issue of teens / kids at risk. Sites like http://stalkerati.com etc are useful, but they’re only going to fan the flames calling for legislation if they don’t make some attempt at self-policing. All it takes is one lawsuit from the parents of one 16 year old.

As the creator of this website/application, I’d like to clarify my intentions. This was a fun concept, brought from idea to (brutally simplistic) implementation in a weekend while I was in the middle of hosting an event (SuperHappyDevHouse 10 at France Telecom). This is not a dotCom business model to make billions. This is an amusing attempt to see if something that I put together in a weekend can make any money at all. Maybe the answer is no! But if the answer is, say, $2500 over the life of the website, I’ll consider it a success. A $400m NASDAQ player this is not.

You can come visit the DevHouse wiki at http://shdh.org/ and see some of the other projects that launched over a single weekend like 40deals.com, SaleTracker.org, and the rather-amusing panhandlr.com. Enjoy!

Very cool site with a good idea.

Cool Site and Good idea!

How many VCs have pinged you since launch? That’s the real metric.

-David

@13

@9: Huh?

Let me clarify: most of this stuff is useless fluff similar to what we saw in 1998. A few people will make money; most will go out of business. Basically this is a weak echo of the trillion-dollar collapse of the hype-driven dotcom phenomenon.

What don’t you get?

@29: This is “fluff” for fun (see creator’s comment above), and for some of us it happens to be useful, and delightfully simple.

As I understand it, Michael’s goal on techcrunch is not to cover only startups, but various products using the vague “Web 2.0″. I think that the scope of this blog is a bit wider than some readers make it out to be. Similarly, I think that the scope of singlestat is much narrower than you are making it out to be. I of course am saying this in hindsight after reading the origin of the site from the creator’s own mouth (keyboard).

I have faith in people, that our memories are long enough to not put too much stock into “internet businesses” with no clear business plan or profit model. Like you, I have seen some more serious startups lately which reek of dotcom-era optomism acheive funding, but instead of rounds of 30-70 million we’re hearing of sub-1 million initial funding angel rounds. I’d love especially to think that the VC’s, and we the investors and inventors, remember that era

@29: This is a fun and potentially helpful project done in a weekend, not some dot-bomb sucking up tens of millions of retirees’ dollars to FedEx dog food to people. Modern infrastructure makes launching and maintaining these services nearly free. Many “web 2.0″ services will come out, even more than in the dotCom days, and most won’t go anywhere…but unlike with The Crash, not very much will be lost in the process. This is what innovation looks like - a lot of ideas, most bad. (You’re certainly free to call SingleStat.us a bad idea.) Some will do well, often ones that are hard to predict except in hindsight. The lowering costs of experimentation will produce an increasing number of experiments (most of which are inevitably going to fail), so if you don’t like the idea of thousands of silly little sites popping up and trying something new, you’d better go take some Dramamine. There are going to be a lot of weekend-project websites like mine. Thankfully, this will help the good ideas stand up more quickly and drown out the bad ideas in the noise.

The problem with this concept is that, while it is somewhat novel, it could be done away with very easily. If myspace decides to launch a similar feature and integrate it into its (already nebulous) featureset then that will be the last we’ll see of singlestat.us

does this violate myspace’s TOS? I was thinking of building a few services layered on top of myspace but decided against it because of their terms of service…

Ah, well in that case… neat.

You could also accept the users’ profile, scan their friends and alert the single status for those who match the users sexual preference.

Weekend project, cool…

I’ve got one better… Predictive Analysis on when someone may become Single. Ie: 3 months, 6 months, 2 weeks, etc. Needs lots of data and probably not too accurate given the nature of myspace, but it would be a great concept.

I added RSS feeds for friendslist status changes on DatingAnyone.com. If it’s going to be Web2.0, might as well go whole-hog.

Nice (and funny) little concept. You think myspace users immediately go and change their relationship status as soon as they break up? It’d be amusing to hear any success stories with this.

As a tool, fun. As a business, yikes. I agree that the “service” ought to be free for the viral value it provides. With a MySpace audience that big pouring through a free service, I imagine revenue could be generated just with AdSense, as icky as that is.

To be honest, it’s a fitting widget for MySpace, which seems to be stuffed to the gills with horny teenagers wanting to hook up.

Great idea. There are many of my friends who are obsessed with tracking this on Facebook. Their approach is new, and pretty genius. Either pay up, or promote them.

do it works ?
i don’t think it’s a good idea!

I think I win the “shortest lived dot-Com award. Just got a C&D from MySpace.

hello,nice to meet you

In retrospect, C&D and choice of services aside, the short life of SingleStat.us remains a good example of what is possible with bootstrap entrepreneurship today. At the same time, the sequence of events that followed including interest from a VC in a project that essentially required no capital investment just because of its sexiness, may demonstrate that bootstrapping is the best way to go anyway rather than the craps shoot of trying to attract deep pockets.

That C&D they sent would be difficult to defend, in court. It appears to me to be an empty threat, honestly.

Nevertheless, by trying to stop such add-on services, they’re only shooting themselves in the foot - making their site less useful to their users. I’m sure if they refuse to allow such things, their competition will be more than happy to!

I was more attracted to the free iPOD advertisment on your web-blog