The Web Application Nursery

Question

So, The Web Application Graveyard is a little depressing. All those good apps that are no longer around. Worse, all that helpful content here that no longer has any use and is cluttering up the place.

But there's new apps coming online all the time. We don't seem to get many questions outside of the biggies (Google apps, Facebook, Twitter). I suggest that there's not a lot of questions about other apps because people don't naturally find their way here when they do have questions, because there aren't any questions here already.

What I'm trying to say is, how about a project where we seed the site with good questions (and answers) for new web applications?

For instance, Google Photos was recently announced with some fanfare. We've been getting some good questions (google-photos), but we have a lot of questions about other Google apps, so that's not really surprising. We could always use more.

Or how about Skype for Web, which was just announced as being in beta testing? Certainly people are going to have questions about that. How about we try to anticipate a few and get some content here for people who are searching for it?

I mean, there's probably even a set of questions we could put together that would be applicable to most apps that people might want to know.

• How do I delete my account on <X>?
• How do I export my data from <X>?
• How do I get an RSS feed of my content from <X>?
• How do I control who gets to see <Y> on <X>?
• etc.

Is anybody interested in helping with this? How should we proceed?

Answer 1

I'm interested in helping early adopters to find their way into new apps and to learn the ropes here.

Answer 2

Well, why don't we start a question once a quarter, twice a year, whatever, with a list of all the latest and greatest apps, and then people can claim one and work through the canonical questions for them?

I wonder if the neglected blog would be somehow useful . . .

Answer 3

I suggest that there's not a lot of questions about other apps because people don't naturally find their way here when they do have questions, because there aren't any questions here already.

I disagree. There's not a lot of questions about other apps because typically these questions get no answers, sometimes get closed for no reason, and then get automatically removed.