The college project I'm working on

Today marks the launch of the Facebook Development Platform, as posted in the News forum.

And… unfortunately for me, browsing through the facebook discussion boards reveals that a lot of other people are already working on the project that I’ve been developing for the past few months, which confirms to me that my idea is not totally unique. Thus, there’s really no need to keep it a secret anymore.

I know that this really should be posted in Random, but most of the people that know what project I’m referring to hang out here.

So, for the past few months I’ve been working on an online college flyer board, because I think it’s stupid that people have to pay the sharp price tag that facebook.com offers. My site, when complete, will make money through ads and won’t charge any membership fees or any kind of fee to post a flyer. What makes it better than facebook though is that the flyers would be searchable, where as facebook’s flyerboard is pretty cluttered and unorganized. Other sites that offer a similar service I find to be cluttered to the point that it affects usability. (Does anyone else besides me think that craigslist is the biggest mess you’ve ever seen?)

I must admit, I’m pretty bummed out. I thought I had a somewhat original idea, and I didn’t. I knew that there were some sites that offered things like this, but they were only successful at their home schools (mostly because the interfaces were so cluttered I think).

Here’s my question. I’ve poured many months of work into this project, and I still think it could be successful at my school (UCF) because there isn’t another service like it that people use there, but I’m unsure about other schools in light of recent developments. Do you think I should finish the project since it’s near completion? Or do you think it was a stupid idea in the first place and that I should just comes to terms with that fact and scrap it?