There I Go Again… Blogging Half Cocked Again.

Last week I was very excited to have found DocSyncer... providing me the ability to synchronize my local MS Office Documents with Google Docs.

I was pretty pleased with the ability to upload my files from my desktop in one fell swoop and then manage the files either on my computer on on Google Docs.

The problem was, it didn't really work. All my files got loaded up, but I learned that they didn't synchronize at all... once they were loaded, the versions no longer matched up.

I thought that I would take a few minutes today to see if I could figure it out and get it to work... because it is really cool.

When I went to the DocSyncer website, I found this note.

Thank you for your interest in DocSyncer. Our service will be shutting down on June 20th, 2008. All current users can continue to access and use the service until that time.

DocSyncer began largely as an experiment. When our primary startup (ProtectMyPhotos) began to appear that it wasn't going to work out, we wanted to try something radically different with our technology. In a very short amount of time, we were able to build DocSyncer for the world to enjoy. However, it was always an experiment and we weren't sure it could be a business. We've figured out in a very short amount of time that DocSyncer is a cool tool - but not a business. With no way to pay for itself, we'd rather shut the service down than let it fall into decay as our team begins to work on a new project. We regret that anyone who's enjoyed DocSyncer will be disappointed to see it go - we're certainly disappointed as well. Nonetheless, we made some great progress with DocSyncer that we're proud of. We synced more than 5 million documents to Google Docs - making us the largest user in the history of the Google Docs API.

Until we meet again, good luck and thank you for the support!

Couple of thoughts I have.

1. Shouldn't you figure out if you have a business model before you work on building something this cool?
2. If Google can do it for free, why can't they?
3. It really is a cool idea. If they could just get it to work right, I bet Google would buy it.

Oh well... I'll have to be careful to do a little more research before I think something is cool.