When I first got the idea of Unscatter.com, it was to be a possible startup. I have ideas of business to business features that I still think will work. Originally it was to be a hosted search solution for businesses websites and social assets such as what they have on Youtube, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.

I dropped the custom search a while into development, and started building the news portal it is today. The goal of the news portal was always to test the data acquisition goals I had. I still plan to eventually offer widgets which would aggregate content from multiple sources that website owners can place on their websites. The business plan for that piece would be offer varying levels of service for the widget with a freemium based model.

I also intend to build into the site functionality similar to what I have at http://www.choip.me though with more backend processing. That current site is still just too half baked.

During the time I’ve been working on the site I’ve done a lot of research into business and startups. I’ve also witnessed the birth of my second child and been working with my wife to make sure we have as much time as possible as a family, especially with her getting back into her career.

Lately, I’ve had no time to put into Unscatter.com and it’s been a source of frustration for me. I’ve felt like it was something I needed to get done, because I was planning on it being a startup. What I’ve come to realize is at this phase in my life I really have no time to do a startup. It doesn’t even fit with the priorities I have. I really have no problems with working for other people, I just like doing interesting work. I’m not going to stop working on unscatter.com. I think it’s fun and it does make a good hobby. Some people build furniture, crochet blankets or build rocking horses. I build a website. By making it a hobby it also means I can change my priorities and get the stuff I personally want out of it done.

I’m going to start working on the UI for what’s there more. The current implementation is, well, ugly. I also want to play with some of the newer widgets that are out with YUI3. I’ve been working with Python so much on the backend that Javascript is making me scratch my head again. I also want to work on the idea of posting longer tweets and Facebook status messages. Basically the whole choip.me concept. I’m somehow going to fit that into Unscatter.com. Lastly I’m going to eventually get to the widget idea I have, but I doubt I will offer to publish or sell it as a solution for a while as I’m not really interested in providing a service for anyone else that I’d want to guarantee. However I would like to get it working for Unscatter.com itself and maybe this blog as well.

There’s some other things that have happened as well that have led me to this decision. I’m currently using the Bing API for news, and would like to take a look at Yahoo Boss V2. That won’t be out until early next year. Not much point in putting a lot of effort into the news site if I’m going to consider changing to an API that’s a big unknown functionality wise right now. The Bing API is nice, but I’d like to have more choices for monetization on my pages than what’s available using Bing.

Unscatter.com is not going down. It’s just not going to be a focus for me. I’m not sure it ever will be. I’ve never really had a strong interest in creating a startup and making millions of dollars. My interests since the birth of my first child has always been the provide my family with a safe home with a caring husband/father. Doing a startup doesn’t really make sense with that goal, as from what I’ve seen of other founders the startup takes up more time than I think I am willing to give at this point in my life. Maybe 10-15 years from now I’ll change my mind, but right now I want to hang out with my babies and my wife.

I think this blog post is more of a point of giving myself closure on that decision than anything else, so I apologize to anyone who has read this entire thing and been bored out of their mind doing it. Future posts will be back to me talking about technology.