10. Sean Parker's AirTime

Welcome to CNET's 2012 Tech Turkeys, from a hyped startup that’s gone nowhere fast to a national intellectual property system that's crushing American innovation. We start you with the guys who brought us Napster so many years ago:

10. Sean Parker's AirTime

We promised ourselves we wouldn't start this with a "You know what’s cool?" joke about Sean Parker's dismally disappointing AirTime. But we admit to that being painfully difficult. AirTime, in case you forgot, and let's face it, most people already have, was Parker and Shawn Fanning's PG-rated answer to Chatroulette, the chat service.

AirTime opened in June with a celebrity-infused, but buggy, press conference demonstration, with big names such as Jim Carrey and Alicia Keys. It was a classic, how-these-things-work-these-days moment for tech: lots of sizzle but not a whole lot of steak. (Insert your own metaphor: more smoke than fire, more bark than bite, all hat and no cattle, etc.).

And then very few people used AirTime. Parker said at the D conference in October that his site had just 10,000 active users. Fanning no longer has a day-to-day role in the company, and Parker is terribly busy serving on six different boards. Still, he assured his audience that Airtime will be "transforming communications."

We're looking forward to that.