The honor of the suckiest startup of the group, in my oh so humble opinion, goes to Drop Box. First of all, I have to say the ideas from Y Combinator’s demo days seemed more differentiated than TechStars’. I was actually excited about some of the ideas, assuming the execution lives up to the sound clip.But Drop Box is entering an important market that no one gives a crap about and no one spends money on. From MySpace onward (the online storage incarnation of the company)…there are zillions of players that all charge too much for backup. The “Time Machine”esque portions of the service seem cool enough, but I don’t think it’s going to overcome the fact that people ain’t gonna pay. So for that, they get my vote.   

 
In the case of iYomu, which is an iSocial Network for iGrownups, the iAnswer is neither.

My guess is that not too many grown ups are using the site’s tools–iYLocate, iYCommunity (which lets you find people with similar interests), or iYDNA (which seems to be a sorta personality test).

Look out Facebook! Linked In, you’re dead!

Maybe I’m wrong, and this is going to be the next big thing. But I’d be willing to bet a bit of money that it ain’t.

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TechCrunch says “Texty is a dead simple but useful new internet service that you can use to quickly create and edit content on a web page with zero HTML or programming skills.”

I say that it’s a waste of time. What’s the point?

The way it works is that you write your snippets at texty and then get an embed URL to paste in other webpages. Where ever that embed code is placed, the text (or content) snippet will show up.

Here’s why it’s pointless. If someone has an HTML page, they can just write the content directly in the page a hell of a lot easier than going to texty and then pasting embed code. If they have a blog, they already have WYSIWYG editing. Ditto on social networks.

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It’s a novel concept–renting books online “like NetFlix.”

How much does one pay for the privilege of reading used books with others’ greasy fingerprints?

The cheapest plan starts at $20 per month!!! Hehe…The “recommended best value plan” is $36/month.

BookSwim has stated its goal is to rent 1,000,000 books by 2010! I’ll be very very impressed if they make it with a zero or two chopped off.
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Wow! This is one of the ugliest pages I’ve seen in a while. Reminds me of the first web page I created in 1995. Doesn’t make me want to entrust my website to their site builder–that’s for sure!

I guess it is free. And the underlying templates aren’t insanely bad. But you have to admit that the homepage that sells the service is hilarious! I predict that in about 3 years, this “vintage” look and feel will be all the rage. Let’s just hope these guys last long enough to capitalize on the vintage web bandwagon.

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UPDATE: As Eric & Zahasman point out in the comments, it looks like the CSS wasn’t loading correctly when I took the screenshots. I hit reload a few times, but it still looked the same. I’ll have to give it another shot one of these days.
 

Fichey takes screenshots of popular websites and lets users browse the screenshots. While the service is pointless, the eye candy animation of the screenshots is quite elegant.

But it’s still stupid! Who the hell wants to look at static screenshots of websites? Isn’t the whole point of the web to be dynamic?

I sure hope they don’t plan to make any money.

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