A few years ago I conceived and launched a little project called i-confide.

It was based on the idea of collecting people's innermost thoughts, dreams, hopes and fears. The site provided a 'trigger' (ie "I still harbour a dream to...") which people could respond to and then share with the world (anonymously if you so wished).

You could also rate, comment and favourite other people's confides.

The project was a lot of fun - a labour of love - and I learned much from it. It had some modest success; basically almost 2000 entries from loads of people in various countries around the world.

I recently decided to take the website down as I couldn't dedicate any more time or effort to it and there were a few too many bugs making it unusable.

If I had my time over, I would have created a simpler mechanic - the triggers weren't a complete success, even if people could create their own - and it probably appealed to too narrow an audience to get any real network effect. But what I really learned has how difficult it can be to sustain interest over a longer period when you can't control aspects like development, interaction design and visual design (not to mention promotion etc).