Let me guess, you're using webrtc to deliver a screencast of a headless VM to my browser plus JS to capture I/O events and deliver them over a websocket to the server essentially replicating the functionality of a "zero client" using modern web technologies, no?
I am currently, working on something that does that. We have a couple clients now and we do the full website that includes Donations, Photos, etc.
We are trying to avoid the hackernews traffic right now as we improve our product for our current customers. You can PM me on twitter for more info. https://twitter.com/cowholio4
Eh, tell me about it. That machine, bought brand new, would set you back ~1.6k USD here in Egypt -- the equivalent of a whole year's income for some...
Seriously, someone should start an Ebay for charitable giving.
Do you think there's still a market for feed readers? I've built one (not public yet) with two somewhat distinct features: 1. you get a river of news with the ability to perform complex search queries against your feeds; and 2. it provides relevance sorting of articles based on your reading history.
I've found that search, when accompanied by tagging, provides a reasonable alternative to the folder-based feed management approach while relevance sorting helps cut down the time I have to spend wading through the never-ending stream of articles.
Should I consider opening it for the public? I don't want to spend money on hosting and bandwidth unless there's a reasonable chance to recover some of the associated costs.
If _money_ is the issue, http://aws.amazon.com/free/ could get you started without spending money on hosting or bandwidth.
But the difference between free and $20/month for a linode should be dwarfed by the other costs, namely your time. But then again, time is only as expensive as your next best alternative usage: if you're learning enough by "wasting" time, it's probably a win!
FWIW, I want this. I want it bad enough that I've had fits and starts going at it myself, but nowhere near even an mvp. My work-around for dealing with feeds right now is to only obsessively check a few that I can't stand the thought of missing, and once in a while poking at all the others. I think I would be much happier with what you describe.
Seriously though, (don't take this personally, but) being concerned about the hosting fees is probably one of the single worst reasons I've heard to NOT launch something. As mentioned, there are HUGE swaths of services which will host you for less than a dollar a month. Clearly, you won't be relying on them to give you five 9's of uptime but will certainly give you enough of an indication if your product satisfied enough paying customers to make it worth your while.
Hell, if you want, I will put you up on my reseller server and not charge you a red cent until you hit your 100th paying customer. And I'll even help you migrate to better hosting when you're ready. No, you won't get 24/7 technical support, but you'll get a control panel to handle 95% of what you'll need. Let me know if you're interested.
Anyway, yes. If you feel like this is something you want to invest more time into and want to offer it to the market, then by all means give it go. Worst case scenario, you'll experience the sweet stench of failure. (At which point you'll dust yourself off and try again.) :D
