Which technology, product, or startup do you think deserves a comeback?
Yesterday, I kept thinking about the launch of @Startups.RIP by @sfoscar .
It was a really interesting concept, and it made me reflect on how certain technologies tend to come back to life in waves across different eras.
For example, these I remember from university lectures:
Technology | First emergence | Major hype waves | Recent/modern phase |
|---|---|---|---|
3D | 1950s–60s (early experiments) | 1980s–90s (graphics), 2009–2013 (3D movies boom) | 2010s–today (3D printing, industrial use, steady adoption) |
VR | 1960s (early prototypes) | 1990s (first consumer hype), 2012–2016 (Oculus revival) | 2016–now (gaming, enterprise, spatial computing) |
NFTs | 2012–2015 (early blockchain experiments) | 2017 (CryptoKitties), 2021 (mainstream boom) | 2022–now (post-hype, utility-focused use cases) |
Sometimes things don’t fail because they’re inherently bad, but because:
the founder didn’t have enough stamina or resources to keep pushing it forward
the market wasn’t ready at that exact moment
the timing was off (regulation, infrastructure, or user behaviour wasn’t aligned yet)
the narrative around the product wasn’t strong enough to keep attention long-term, etc.
And yesterday's launch made me wonder:
Which products, companies, or technologies do you think deserve a second chance, even though they didn’t make a huge impact the first time around?
Replies
Real Favicon Generator
minimalist phone: creating folders
@ph_bernard As a creator – I like this idea :D Finally something that would improve my situation positively :D
Real Favicon Generator
RSS feeds. Genuinely one of the most elegant content distribution solutions ever built and it got killed not because it was bad but because Google shut down Reader and took the habit with it. The underlying idea - you own your feed, you choose your sources, no algorithm between you and the content - is more relevant now than it was in 2013. Every time someone complains about algorithmic timelines or doomscrolling they are basically describing a problem RSS already solved. Just needs a modern consumer wrapper and a founder with enough stamina to rebuild the habit.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@oshylabs Maybe they weren't so addictive. That's why they had to reduce it. :)
@busmark_w_nika RSS gave u info without the dopamine loop. No likes, no follower counts, no infinite scroll. Just content u chose, delivered cleanly. Platforms that followed optimised for time on-site instead and won the attention war. But irony is that people who miss RSS the most are usually the highest value users, developers, founders, researchers. Not a bad audience to build for.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@oshylabs yeah, but big tech companie need addicted people to have audience to sell the ad spots :)
Vine, it died because Twitter didn't invest in it, not because the format was broken. Six seconds forced real creativity, and ironically, everything TikTok and Reels are doing now proves the idea was right, just a decade too early.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@farrukh_butt1 I have heard they wanted to renew it, but somehow it didn't happen... again.
@busmark_w_nika The timing feels better now than ever, honestly — short form video is just part of how people communicate today.
Startups.RIP
Glad the project was thought-provoking! That was one of the reasons we decided to build it. As technologists, we spend almost all our attention pontificating, predicting, and inventing the future, we forget sometimes history can give us just the inspiration we need. Here are a few products & tech that come to mind as worth revisiting:
In the early 2020s, there's was a personal knowledge management (PKM) or, more poetically, "tools for thought". Roam Research led the charge on this wave of products. I think they were just missing LLMs as the connective tissue that saves us from the tedium of manually updating a digital representation of everything we know & care about. Muse comes to mind as one "too early" product that could've really benefited from LLMs. The founder wrote a great retrospective.
Magic Leap -- anyone remember the whale demo?
Pebble: before my time, but I support the philosophy behind it. Dumb phones are taking off now as we search for more harmonious tech. I believe the founder actually bought the brand and is already working on bringing it back!
AI shopping, e.g. Fetchr
A fun consumer one: Detour -- walking audio tours around cities. Imagine chatting with a voice agent as it guides you through a city you're visiting.
In chip design, advancements came mostly shrinking feature size (Dennard scaling) over the last six decades. As we run out of juice to squeeze there, I believe we'll see many old ideas implemented in AI chips & hardware-software co-design, like photonics, neuromorphic / biologically-inspired, approximate computing, non-Von Neumann architectures, etc.
There are surely countless more if I just think about it for longer. It's such a great prompt. Thanks for checking out @Startups.RIP 🤗
minimalist phone: creating folders
@sfoscar I remember only Pebble, but of course, with your project, you reminded people, and who knows... maybe inspired them to rebuild those tools to something better :)
Can I still be part of the community if my vote goes to the return of Club Penguin? I feel that was the peak of the internet 🔮
minimalist phone: creating folders
@ruxandra_mazilu I totally missed that trend. What was that about? :D